SEO for AI Content: What Does Google’s New Search Guideline Mean?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly growing and revolutionizing the way content is created. Ever since the emergence of ChatGPT, Bard, and Bing AI, the majority of you must have tried out these writing tools to ease your task and speed up the work.

When we spoke about this with a Dallas SEO company, the experts mentioned that AI-generated content isn’t technically new, they have been providing information for several years.

So, whether or not you are using AI, you probably might have questions – Is AI content equal to human-written content? What does AI-generated content mean for SEO?

Google published ‘Google Search’s guidance about AI-generated content,’ in February 2023, which clarified that –

“Google’s ranking systems aim to reward original, high-quality content that demonstrates qualities of what we call E-E-A-T: expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.”

Later in the article, it was also mentioned –

“Poor quality content isn’t a new challenge for Google Search to deal with. We’ve been tackling poor quality content created both by humans and automation for years. We have existing systems to determine the helpfulness of content.”

After speaking with SEO specialists in some of the renowned digital marketing companies in Dallas, we understood the whole AI and SEO scenario.

What Does AI-Generated Content Mean?

Lately AI-generated content has been a hot topic, and it is only growing in popularity with tools like ChatGPT, continuing to pour out newer versions. With everyone sharing their opinions on AI writing tools, what it is, and what it means for the future of content, no one really knows where these tools will bring us in the future.

To understand the basics, AI-generated content is a type of computer-generated copy that presents information to the users in the form of blogs, articles, product descriptions, emails, web content, and social media captions and taglines.

However, as easy as it sounds, there are several drawbacks to this. AI fetches you results on the existing material, the content isn’t always cent percent accurate.

Is Google Against AI-Generated Content?

AI writing tools can be beneficial as well as problematic. ChatGPT can provide information and content that relates to the readers, however, such content can influence search engine rankings that violate Google’s policies. How?

In the Spam Policies section, Google mentions to avoid “Text generated through automated processes without regard for quality or user experience.”

There are companies effortlessly using AI content to create spammy articles without keeping the user benefit in mind and producing articles solely for SEO purposes. And such content is categorized as ‘Spammy automatically-generated content’ that should be avoided.

As mentioned earlier in this article, Google focuses on ranking original, informative, and quality content that exhibits E-E-A-T quality. Brands struggling with producing valuable content or lacking time to maintain their blog can let reliable digital marketing companies in Dallas handle the work.

It’s clear that whether the content is created by a human writer or generated by AI, if you want to rank in Google, your main focus should be on creating content primarily for readers.

Can Google Detect and Penalize AI Content?

Now we know that Google isn’t against AI-powered content, so they do not particularly penalize it either. However, if the AI content is used to manipulate search rankings, it will be de-indexed.

Following are examples of AI-written content that can be penalized:

• Cloaking – When presenting different content to users with the intent to mislead or manipulate them.
• Duplicate content – Content that is not original, meaning that the content already exists on your or some other site. Such content does not provide any unique value to the readers and thus can be penalized.
• Doorway pages – Certain pages are created only for Google, and these pages provide very less information to the users. So, it’s best to stop generating a bunch of content solely for SEO using AI.
• Poor quality content – Whether written by humans or AI, content that isn’t good enough for readers are deprioritized if it’s poorly written.
• Spam – Content that is created just for the sake of search rankings.

It’s important to remember that these policies do not solely apply to AI written content. If human-written content doesn’t make sense or is inaccurate can also get you blacklisted by Google.

Although Google has stated that AI content doesn’t go against any guidelines, that doesn’t mean that AI content cannot get penalized.

The Who, How, and Why of Content

Google added people-first content guidelines, which is a way to understand what content Google seeks to reward.

Who (created the content)

To understand the E-E-A-T of content is “who” created it. When creating content, simply ask these questions –

• Is it understandable for the readers who authored the content?
• Do you know if the bylines are on the pages they need to be?
• Do the bylines give details about the author?

Adding authorship to the content helps you stay clear as to who created the content and also aligns with what Google seeks to reward.

How (the content was created)

Conveying the details to your visitors and readers as to “how” the content was created can help build trust and understand how automation has played a useful role.

For example, a product review can build trust among the readers. Readers can consider your content to be more authentic when it states the number of products tested, how the tests were conducted, and what test results revealed (followed by images or videos as evidence).

Why (was the content created)

“Why” is the most important aspect of your content, meaning why is the content being created in the first place?

If your content manipulates search engine rankings, there’s a chance you could be penalized by the spam policies of Google. And that’s a sign that you need to re-evaluate your content.

Content should be created to help users solve their problems. Even though the content is created by AI, the goal should be to provide helpful information to your users. Your written material must be people-first.

Key Takeaways on AI and Google

Now it is quite clear that Google solely looks for helpful content, whether or not produced by AI. The bottom line is that when your content is valuable, Google continues to reward it.

If you are using AI to game the system, it might not work in your favor. However, if you are using it to fetch ideas and level up your content, it might help in bringing your content to the top of the Search Engine Results Page or SERP (as long as you are creating and publishing people-first content).

It’s early to identify if SEO can be affected by AI, but what’s known is that – the human touch is critical to effectively using AI writing tools. Digital marketing companies in Dallas help brands produce quality and people-first content, keeping in mind your target audience, so you can very well take their help in boosting your business performance and understanding the guidelines placed by Google.