AI-generated content is everywhere nowadays. You can use AI Snapchat filters, Skype messages, and so much more. If you search something on Google, you'll even see an AI-generated snippet as the top result. But how does using AI affect your search engine optimization, your page rankings, and your entire internet presence?
How Does Google Use AI-Generated Content?
If you've used Google anytime lately, you'll notice that the top result is an AI Overview. It tries to answer the question with a paragraph or two of the most relevant information that's pulled from search results.
Google has been using AI assistance for years now - it's how Google determines what you meant to search for when you misspell a word, it efficiently blocks spam emails, and it offers your travel time for Google Maps.
So Google isn't against AI, it's actually quite the opposite!
Why Doesn't AI-Generated Content Perform Well?
When people use the term AI-generated content as far as content creation for websites and blogs, typically they are talking about LLM (large language model) AI like Chat-GPT, Google Gemini, Meta's Llama 3, and more. These programs will use a prompt and write whatever content you request. All of these programs use pre-trained information - that's what the P in GPT stands for!
If you consistently use one of these programs, you'll notice that a lot of the outputs start to sound repetitive. Say for example, you're using AI to write a blog about how to unclog a toilet. There are only so many ways to write this factual information. If 999 other people on the internet have written a blog about this subject using AI-generated content, all 1000 of them are going to have the exact same steps, just worded slightly differently. It's going to have the same effect as if all your friends copied your essay in school.
Did Google Ban AI-Generated Content in 2024?
Recently, most notably since a core update in March, AI-generated content has been reportedly not indexed by Google. If your page with AI content is the same as hundreds or thousands of other pages on the internet, Google is going to consider your page low quality, since it's just a copy of all the other information out there. But has Google actually banned AI-generated content? The answer is technically no. If AI-generated content is well-written, useful information, that follows Google's E-E-A-T guidelines, it should still be indexed and your page should still rank.
If you're planning to just generate an article, copy and paste it, the low effort will be low reward and your article will be most likely not indexed. On the other hand, if you use AI as a tool to outline an article, or to compile information about a topic, there's a decent chance you'll be fine as long as the content is relevant and useful.
How Can AI-Generated Content Affect My Internet Presence?
Google has always closed loopholes that are quick and easy ways to manipulate your search engine rank. When keywords were a large part of SEO, people would try to use irrelevant keywords to try to boost their rankings. This changed when Google updated ranking factors to exclude keywords. Later, SEO included backlinks. When users made high numbers of low-quality backlinks, Google changed the guidelines and only took backlinks with good domain authority into account.
AI-generated content has created a similar loophole - people putting out tons of low-effort content that was hastily generated with AI. So Google's best solution is to simply crack down on their quality guidelines. Feel free to use AI - with caution! - and remember that the best way to gain traffic on the web is to put out information that people want to see.
