Rajan Patel, the VP of Engineering for Search, said on X that Google is making "changes to ranking" to remove prediction content from showing up in the Google Search top stories and news sections.
This comes after some sites are posting "prediction" content, predicting that some sports trades may happen, that have not happened yet, and those "stories" show up in the news section as actually having occurred.
Matt Mikle shared a number of examples on X since the beginning of the year. For when you search for some sports teams or players, fake news comes up. The truth is, these are labled on the site's "predictions" category but no where in the title or image of the post do you see it is a prediction. You need to click over to the content, scroll to the bottom of the page, to know this is not news, but rather a prediction and has not necessarily happened or won't necessarily ever happen.
Here are some examples but Matt posted many more:
Rajan Patel from Google wrote on X:
This is definitely an opportunity for us to improve and we're working on it. We make changes to ranking thoughtfully and after considerable experimentation and analysis, so it won't be a quick fix type of thing but it is something we're prioritizing.
Sorry for the slow reply on this. This is definitely an opportunity for us to improve and we're working on it. We make changes to ranking thoughtfully and after considerable experimentation and analysis, so it won't be a quick fix type of thing but it is something we're…
— Rajan Patel (@rajanpatel) January 16, 2026
So we won't see changes tomorrow but Google is "prioritizing" its efforts to resolve this.
Although, maybe this should be a manual action because of the misleading content policy? That policy reads, "We don't allow preview content that misleads users to engage with it by promising details which aren't reflected in the underlying content."
Prediction articles in itself aren’t bad as long as it says it in the title. But these titles make it seem like the move or trade already happened which is pure click bait pic.twitter.com/CtnagmLVfM
— Matt Mikle (@Moneyman2626) January 16, 2026
Forum discussion at X.
