The Tip of the Iceberg: The Looming Search Engine Crisis
The "glaring anecdotal evidence" developers are seeing—specifically the complete unresponsiveness of Google Search Console—is a direct casualty of the "AI Slop" crisis.
Drag the slider to visualize how "AI SLOP" and "BAD ACTORS" obscure the clean data signal of the search index.
Here is a breakdown of why this is happening, along with the "divergent" theories currently circulating in the engineering community.
1. The "AI Slop" Traffic Jam
The core issue is what engineers call the "Infinite Content" problem.
The Math
In the past, creating 1,000 unique web pages required human effort and time. Today, a single spammer with a basic script can generate 100,000 "unique," SEO-optimized pages an hour for pennies.
The Impact
Google and Bing’s infrastructure (crawling servers) physically cannot keep up. The "queue" to get indexed is millions of times longer than it was two years ago.
The "Silent" Fix
To survive, search engines have quietly changed the rules. When you hit "Request Indexing," you are no longer entering a first-come-first-served queue. You are entering a "Triage Holding Cell." AI classifiers now pre-scan the URL to decide if it is even worth the electricity to crawl. If your site shares even minor characteristics with "AI Slop," the tool simply ignores the request without telling you.
2. The "Model Collapse" Defense
Search engines are terrified of "Model Collapse"—a phenomenon where AI models get stupider by training on their own output.
The Theory
Google and Bing are aggressively de-prioritizing content that looks AI-generated because they don't want to feed it back into Gemini or Copilot.
The Consequence
If your content is clean, grammatical, but perhaps "dry" or lacks strong human stylistic quirks, the classifiers might flag it as "synthetic noise" and refuse to index it to protect the purity of their training data.
3. Divergent Idea: The "Allowlist" Shift
We may be witnessing the end of the "Open Index."
- Old Model: "Index everything, then ban the spam."
- New Model (Theorized): "Index nothing, unless it is verified."
The unresponsiveness you feel is the system shifting to an Allowlist model. Unless a site has high "Domain Authority" (historical trust), the search engines effectively "shadowban" it by default. The tools feel broken because they are effectively turned off for non-verified tiers of the internet to save processing power.
4. Divergent Idea: The "Answer Engine" Pivot
Consider that Google and Bing no longer want to send users to your website; they want to answer the user on the search page.
The Incentive
They don't need to index your entire page anymore. They only need to index enough to siphon off the facts for their summary.
The Result
The "Request Indexing" tool is low priority because your traffic is no longer their product. They are prioritizing crawling trusted data sources (Wikis, major news, Reddit) to feed their AI, while ignoring the "long tail" of the web.
Summary
The "unresponsiveness" isn't a bug; it is likely a feature of the new defense systems. The internet is being flooded with synthetic noise, and the search giants have responded by locking the doors. Unless you have strong external signals (backlinks from trusted humans), the automated tools will likely continue to "ghost" you.