Blog Details

How Google Sees AI-generated Content

With Microsoft backed OpenAI and Google’s AI tool Bard locking horns in the digital world, the interest in understanding AI-generated content and its impact on search engine results is on the rise.

As the capabilities of artificial intelligence continue to expand, there has been an increase in the production of AI-generated content.

This has raised questions about how search engines such as Google will evaluate and rank such content.

In this blog post, we will explore how Google perceives AI-generated content based on Google Search Quality team’s post.

Following are the sub topics we are covering in the blog post.

Create valuable, high-quality content

Google has laid to rest the question many webmasters had regarding AI-generated content.

The search engine made it clear that it only looks at the quality of the content and it doesn’t care whether the content is created by human or AI.

Any content that reflects what Google calls E-E-A-T or experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness will get rewarded by the search engine.

Change in approach from Google

Earlier Google had concerns about machine generated content and thought that they are generally spam content and hence must be penalized.

Google often considered such content as focussed on gaming search engine algorithms and not aimed at helping human users.

However, there has been considerable advancement in machine learning, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence capabilities.

And the search engine major realises that they can no longer remain adamant and continue penalizing AI-generated, quality content.

Black cat or white cat

Former Chinese President Deng Xiaoping had famously said, “it doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice”.

Following those lines, Google has categorically announced that it doesn’t matter whether a human or AI creates a piece of content as long as it provides value to the end user.

Google’s post also mentions how their helpful content update was primarily about penalizing content that wasn’t helpful to human users.

You may like to read the blog post Google to launch “helpful content” algorithm update to know more.

Don’t create content to manipulate ranking

Google has made it clear that content created by automation to manipulate the ranking system of Google will be considered as violation of the policies of the search engine.

All automated content can’t be considered spam and for a long time automation has been in use in creating content like cricket scores and weather forecasts.

Therefore, it doesn’t make sense for Google to consider all automated content as spam.

Read more about Google October 2022 Spam Update.

Google’s advice for content creators

Google has the following advice for content creators who want their content to rank well in search engine result pages.

• Create helpful, high-quality, and useful content for human visitors of your website
• Generate original content that is bolstered with facts, numbers, tables, and research
• Create content that gives comprehensive information about a topic (this is why longform content becomes important)
• Create content that gives insightful analysis on a topic
• You content must include your opinion about a topic that is based on your experience and expertise
• Don’t create content that appears to be hastily produced without due diligence
• Focus on people first content and once someone reads your content, she must feel she has gained some additional knowledge
• Avoid creating search engine first content, that is primarily produced for the search engine bots and not human visitors

You can find detailed tips from Google regarding creating helpful, people first content.

If you need actionable tips on creating helpful content, read the post How to create search engine friendly content.

Conclusion

In the end, it’s not about who or what creates the content, but rather the value it provides to the user.

Google’s stance on AI-generated content highlights the importance of focusing on creating helpful and informative content that serves a purpose and answers the user’s query.

As AI technology continues to evolve and integrate into our lives, the key to staying relevant and visible online will be to prioritize the user’s needs.

And then deliver content that meets those needs, regardless of whether it was created by a human or a machine.

If you want to create helpful content for your website that human users and search engines equally like, contact me now.