Google: Is It Against AI-Generated Content?

As artificial intelligence capabilities continue to expand, we see it affecting many more aspects of daily life. Recently, a ton of media has focused on apps like Chat GPT and Neuraltext that claim to respond to text-based questions by generating natural language responses. Creating unique content can be incredibly time-consuming, and hiring writers is often expensive, which is why the idea of using AI for digital marketing services can be appealing. But it comes with some risks, as this article covers.

What is AI-Generated Content, and How do Search Engines interpret it?

These platforms use a field of AI known as natural language processing (NLP), which aims to teach machines to understand and interpret human language. Natural language processing generates content based on its current understanding of language. And while using AI-generated content may seem tempting as it can potentially save time and money, there are some downsides.

Most importantly, it’s vital to understand how search engines treat AI-generated content since most content found online exists to help potential customers find the right company, product, or information to meet their needs. Therefore, the question of how Google treats AI-generated content is incredibly important.

First, it’s important to understand that while AI-generated responses can generally develop a coherent and reasonable response to most queries or commands, it’s still really easy for AI platforms to detect generated responses with a very high degree of accuracy.

If you compare two passages, one generated by AI and one completed by a human, you can quickly see the difference, as the image below demonstrates. The sections highlighted in green are predictive text generated by AI. As you can see, the one on the left, also the one completed by AI, has much more green than the one on the right, which a human wrote. These detection systems are not always foolproof but often serve as a good indicator for identifying AI-generated content.

It is relatively easy for search engines to identify which pieces of content are AI-generated and which are written by humans. And while Google and other search engines don’t inherently believe AI-generated is bad, they emphasize that the content needs to be written for people.

The bottom line is that Google views AI-generated content as spam. As Google’s Search Advocate John Mueller stated last year, “People have been automatically generating content in lots of different ways. And for us, if you’re using machine learning tools to generate your content, it’s essentially the same as if you’re just shuffling words around, or looking up synonyms, or doing the translation tricks that people do—those kinds of things. My suspicion is maybe the quality of content is a little bit better than the really old-school tools, but for us, it’s still automatically generated content, and that means for us it’s still against the Webmaster Guidelines. So we would consider that to be spam.”

Additionally, automatically-generated content often does not have the emotional intelligence to connect with users. Unfortunately, without the ability to connect emotionally, reading AI-generated content often results in a low-quality user experience.

Even the creators of many AI content generators recognize that these platforms are overhyped, and many users overestimate their capacity. It’s also vital to realize that while most AI-generated content will pass plagiarism checks, it won’t have anything original. It collects information already available on a topic. It cannot incorporate original research, data, insights, or opinions.

Unfortunately, this is a huge drawback for many companies considering using AI writing platforms since the goal is often to include digital content that can help a company become a thought leader within its industry. Also, if you want to create content on current events or rapidly evolving topics, AI platforms are not great at handling these topics. As a result, you will often be left with a biased, inaccurate piece that includes out-of-date information.

Creating Relevant High-Quality Content

Using AI-generated content is an easy way to ensure audiences never get to see your material. However, following a few guidelines can ensure that your content won’t get flagged as spam by Google. You can ask yourself the following questions:

Will your established or targeted audience benefit from the information if they come to you directly?
Is your content clearly demonstrating first-hand expertise and depth of understanding (for example, expertise gained by using a product or service or visiting a location)?
Is there a primary goal or focus for your website?
Would somebody leave your content feeling they’ve learned enough about a topic to assist them in reaching their goal?
Would somebody who reads your article feel satisfied with their experience?
Are you following the recommendations for core updates and product reviews?

These questions help you establish a direction for your content. Essentially, Google has stated that they are looking for quality content, which is one of the ways they prioritize search results. Therefore, if you want your content to be at the top and for your company to be considered a thought leader in its industry, you must have high-quality content that connects emotionally with your target audience.

And while this sounds like there is no place in content creation for artificial intelligence platforms, these technologies can still help with the process, provided you are not relying on them for all content creation. Rather, it can help you develop quality content by doing the following:

Providing a starting point with existing research
Helping to overcome writer’s block by giving you topic ideas
Pulling together multiple sources that you can reference for independent research
Organizing research to help you create new insights or opinions
Improving your quality, consistency, grammar, and accuracy
Creating meta descriptions
Ensuring content is on-brand by referencing past pieces of content

Using AI platforms for these tasks while moderating the content to ensure it is emotionally appealing can help you create strong content tailored to your audience. And in the end, this is what matters to Google, providing a good user experience. For more information about creating high-value content or enhancing your digital marketing services, contact eGlobal Web Solutions today.

eGlobal Web Solutions specializes in marketing your business via the digital marketplace. We use search engine optimization, social and review promotion, and Email marketing for all types of businesses, from local to global. We utilize various digital marketing techniques to increase your internet presence, optimize your traffic and generate new business.