The question of whether publishing AI-written content on your website will get you ranked or penalized has been a topic of confusion for marketers. Even some of Google’s key employees seem unsure about this topic.
Last year, Google released a helpful content update designed to reward sites that published helpful content while suppressing sites that published unhelpful content. For the first time in a long time, Google talked about site-wide penalties for sites that fell foul of this algorithm update.
That Really Hurt
Boy, did I get punished on this one. One website of mine had been rolling along nicely with quite a few top ranked articles, giving a good traffic flow & a decent amount of regular sales.
Then bang, the entire thing fell of a cliff & into the abyss of online garbage.
Seemingly never to return.
This really annoyed me, because a lot of the articles were solely to help people in my chosen niche, to solve problems that they had. I’m in some big Facebook groups & answer peoples questions by directing them to an article on the website.
I always get likes, thank you’s & people saying comments like, great article, very informative,etc
So I don’t really understand & will never know why, my site was hammered so hard by Google.
But hey ho, life goes on.
One of the lines that caught marketers’ attention was that content should be written by people for people.
This seemed to imply that content written by AI for people, would fulfill the helpful content update, but get your website banned anyway.
Last moan & then we’ll carry on.
All of my articles were written by me, no ai, not even outsourced & it didn’t make a blind bit of difference.
By People for People
However, getting back to Google’s “by people for people”, it wasn’t quite that simple.
In 2017, at Google’s annual developer conference, they said that they realized they would be moving from a mobile-first world to an AI-first world. Google has been an early mover in AI, and they’ve been using AI in their search results for some time.
But in the years since, they’ve taken a negative stance towards website owners publishing AI content. In April 2022, in a Google search hangout, John Mueller, who is one of Google’s faces of search, labeled AI content as spam.
This kicked off in the world of SEO, with many SEOs claiming that AI content would never be publishable on websites because it was always going to be considered spam. In April 2022, if you went on the Google webmaster guidelines page on their website, they specifically stated that automatically generated content was against their guidelines and was something that should be avoided.
However, by the end of April 2022, this wording had been changed slightly. It no longer said that automatically generated content per se was bad, but only automatically generated content designed to manipulate search rankings.
This was Google’s favorite caveat: to give a blanket rule that allows it to penalize anything it likes in the future as long as it’s designed to manipulate search ranking.
In August 2022, Google released a helpful content update stating that content should
be written by people for people. This seemed like a clear stance against AI-written content.
However, in November 2022, Danny Sullivan, who is Google’s search liaison, said on Twitter that they haven’t said that AI content is bad.
They’ve said pretty clearly that content written primarily for search engines rather than humans is the issue.
In February 2023, Google changed their official stance again in their developer blogs, stating that they will be rewarding high-quality content, however it is produced.
This is the only viable long-term stance that Google can take.
Can All Ai Content Be Detected?
Open AI used their own detection software to detect their own AI content, and they only got it right 43% of the time.
This means that it’s unlikely that anyone owns AI detection software, that is sufficiently sophisticated to be able to predict with high enough certainty whether the content is AI-generated or not, to actually levy a penalty on that content.
To take advantage of this, you can use AI to help you with your content research, write content outlines, write individual paragraphs, and rewrite or summarize existing content. However, the quality of AI-generated content is not yet there, and it needs human intervention to be of high enough quality to rank.
How Good Is It?
I have used different Ai software & it is remarkable how fast it can generate content. But & it’s a big but, from my experience you have to personally know about what you are wanting it to generate You need experience in your niche to be able to put in the correct input commands, to get any remotely usable output.
If you get into a niche that you know nothing about, set up a website & let Ai do all the content writing for you, I personally don’t think you have a cat in hell’s change of making a success of it.
As time goes by though & Ai learns more & becomes smarter, then who knows what it will capable of in say, 5 years from now.
Experienced marketers can use AI to help them collaborate on content. Google is pro-AI but is against low-quality content.
I have used both Rytr.me & Jasper & both gave pretty good results.
They give you a base from where you can add your own thoughts to the headline paragraphs.
If you want to know more about using Rytr.me you can read this article Ai Content writer- Rytr.me
I did see what happened if you let ai write an entire article of 2500 words.
By the time I had removed sentences & rewritten parts that were not factually correct or just didn’t read well, I reckon I was close to spending the same time as if I had written the article myself from scratch.
But as I said above if you let it put together the content headings for an article & a brief stater paragraph for each heading, then it’s fast & easy to expand on each heading & create a good-looking article that reads well.
As the advancement of ai continues then it will get better & better at what it can achieve.
Don’t Expect It To Know About Everything
I have a website in a pretty tight niche & found that the content created from either, Rytr or Jasper was so vague & lacking any factual information, that it was completely unusable. To the point where when I inputted the relevant keywords & information, on ai system completely gave up & produced no results.
So before you rush out & sign up to an ai content writer, try to get a free trial period & make sure that it is actually capable of writing content in your particular niche.
I did see a video about different Ai software, where one particular product, continuously monitored what you were searching for & what you were doing online, so that it learns more about your interests or niche.
This I can see as the future for Ai software. Instead of expecting it to have read everything online, you want software that learns about what you need it to do. That would be a real game changer.
Google Likes Good Content
So to some up. Google currently accepts the use of ai, so long as the content is good quality & relevant to the reader.
If it is not then your site will be punished in the same way as my website, that I mentioned earlier.
So if your ever going to fall foul of the, all powerfull Google algorithm, it might be slightly less painful, if the content was Ai produced & not pains taking, totally original, hand written work.
I would give Ai a go & see if it works for your niche & for you.
Thanks for reading & feel free to drop a comment below.
