The writing is on the wall for the efficacy of AI-generated content for search engine optimization (SEO) benefit. Google’s quality rating team has been instructed to give pages that use AI-generated content that contains little human-added value the lowest rating — which means that algorithmic advances doing the same won’t be far behind.
What Do Google’s Quality Guidelines Say?
First, Google’s quality rater team is composed of real human beings who use the quality rater guidelines document that Google creates to manually rate the quality of pages that rank for specified search queries. That quality assessment data is then used to train Google’s algorithms to produce better search results algorithmically.
Starting in January 2025, Google’s updated quality rater guidelines (download them here) to include directions regarding AI-generated content for the first time. That means that Google’s algorithms will likely be trained to detect low-quality AI-generated content in the near future. How near? We have no way of knowing.
So how do Google’s quality rater guidelines refer to AI-generated content? You’ll find two instances in section 4.6, Spammy Webpages. The subsections that pertain to AI-generated content include:
- Scaled Content Abuse (Section 4.6.5): “Examples of scaled content abuse include: Using automated tools (generative AI or otherwise) as a low-effort way to produce many pages that add little-to-no value for website visitors as compared to other pages on the web on the same topic.” It goes on to add: “Even if you are unsure of the method of creation, e.g. whether or not the page is created using generative AI tools, you should still use the Lowest rating when you strongly suspect scaled content abuse after looking at several pages on the website.”
- MC [Main Content] Created with Little to No Effort, Little to No Originality, and Little to No Added Value for Website Visitors (Section 4.6.6): “The Lowest rating applies if all or almost all of the MC on the page (including text, images, audio, videos, etc) is copied, paraphrased, embedded, auto or AI generated, or reposted from other sources with little to no effort, little to no originality, and little to no added value for visitors to the website.”
So, in other words, Google’s quality raters are directed to give the lowest quality rating possible to content they expect is AI-generated with little human-added value.
What Google Is Really After
Think about it: The last thing Google wants is to waste crawler resources to crawl through an internet littered with crummy, low-quality content, and generative AI tools are being used to pump it out by the millions.
If Google can spot those pages algorithmically and decline to index them from the start, that saves Google resources and prevents searchers from stumbling across low-quality sites in search results.
Short-Term Gain (Maybe) but Long-Term Pain
Site quality is one of the hardest SEO issues to detect and clean up. And the worst part is that there are no tools that diagnose site quality to tell you that that’s the issue you’re facing, and no tools that will tell you which pages on your site are considered low quality.
You can assume you have quality issues if you’re hit by one of Google’s algorithms, specifically the Core Updates or Spam Updates. Those algorithms can determine quality based on a sitewide measure — having low-quality pages on your site can drag down the organic search performance for the entire site, not just for the low-quality pages.
So let’s put the pieces together:
- Google instructs human quality raters to assign the “lowest” quality rating for content that provides low value add, including AI-generated content;
- Google uses human quality rater data to train its algorithms;
- Google’s algorithms can punish sites at the whole-site level for content quality issues;
- It’s difficult to fix content quality issues across a site, and it takes months and months to rebound from algorithmic dampening.
Using AI-generated content on your site is not worth the risk to your organic search performance.
Ways to Safely Use AI in SEO
Despite the risks of using generative AI for SEO, there are ways to safely use AI to improve the efficiency and efficacy of your content creation.
- Research: Often, you need to optimize or create content on topics you’re not a subject matter expert in. Tools like ChatGPT are incredible research tools in this regard. If you ask it a question, it will not only give you an answer, but explain the answer in easy-to-understand terms. Just remember to always fact-check the information for accuracy.
- Outlining: A well-constructed piece of content should have an outline that flows well behind it. But this was most people’s least favorite part of English classes in school. Ask tools like ChatGPT for an outline on any subject, review and update to ensure you’re adding value, and then complete each section in your own words using your subject matter expertise and/or the information you’ve researched.
- Combating Writer’s Block: Input a general idea or topic, and your favorite AI engine generates ideas in complete sentences that you can use to guide your writing. It gets the ball rolling so that you can keep the momentum going as I write to avoid writer’s block.
It’s just not worth trying to produce content automagically for organic search benefit. Site quality issues can burn a domain’s organic search performance to the ground. Do you really have the ability to withstand decreased organic search leads or revenue over the months or years it can take to fix site quality issues? If the answer is no, then you’ll want to future-proof your performance by saying “No” to AI-generated content today.
