What does Google really think about AI Content?

I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge , hints and tips I've built up over the years . Today , I'm going to talk about what Google really thinks about AI content . So , unless you've been hiding under a rock for the past year , you'll know that AI is now massive in the online and SEO world . There is a plethora of AI content generation tools out there .

You know , from basic using open , open AI's chat , gpt itself to create content , or using one of the plethora of tools that are out there that claim to have various add-ons to make your content be produced at scale without much input and just to create reams and reams and reams of content .

And there's lots of people out there claiming that they've created huge amounts of content with AI , posted on websites and ranked with it , and everyone's saying well , not everyone , but lots of people are saying that Google have said AI content is fine and they've got no issue with it .

And this all dates back to a post that they put on developersgooglecom back in when was it ? February , the 8th , 2023 . So that was back just over a year ago , where they essentially said AI content isn't necessarily bad . You know , as long as content is good for the user , however it's produced , it's good for the user , that's fine .

Now this has led lots of people to just thinking that's a free pass for any AI content and that it's not against Google's terms of service .

Now , just the other day , danny Sodavan , who is the Google search liaison and posts at search liaison on Twitter , he said using automation , including AI , to generate content with the primary purpose of manipulating ranking and search results is a violation of our spam policies . It's something we thought we were pretty clear about from our post last year .

People who read that and somehow interpret as a free pass should seriously be rethinking . I'm sure you'll also see us look at ways to make this even clearer Now . If you go and read the document they posted last year and I'll put a link to it in the show notes it is an interesting read .

It's worth going through it a couple of times because there's a bit of nuance in it . What they're essentially saying is people used automation to create content before AI .

This would be things like automating weather reports , automating sports reports , automating page creation , and that there are ways of doing it that are okay where it's good for the users and there's ways of doing it where it's bad , where people are just trying to manipulate the search results .

Now they're saying that just because you're using AI to create something , it doesn't mean it's necessarily bad , just like they can't ban all human created content . Just because humans created systems that created lots of pages created spammy content . A human can create spammy content . It's still spammy content . They're saying that AI can create content .

If it's spammy content , it's spammy content . They don't ban all humans from creating content just because some human content is spam . They're saying we're not going to ban all AI content just because some of it is spam . What they're trying to say is spam is spam and good content is good content , however it is produced . It doesn't matter how it's produced .

It depends on the quality of the content . Now I'm looking at the kind of reports I've seen of people who have made claims to have created all this AI content and they show HREF graphs or people outing other sites . So look at this person it's all AI on this site and look at how they're going to the moon with their traffic .

Then quite often you see , not long afterwards , big drop in the traffic . And I think obviously Google's taken many elections there . I think they are trying probably still to work out how to deal with this influx of content , and I can see the point , because the trouble is AI content .

If it can just be created en masse with no input , then what's going to happen is the web of the internet is just going to be flooded with sort of carbon copy content , all pretty much saying the same thing .

It might be a bit of nuance to it because it's created with AI or even it's created by human , but there's going to be such a flood that it's going to become useless .

If all the content is just regurgitated you know large language models producing the same content , answering the same questions with the same basic answer Then yeah , the web is going to become just pointless . We're just going to drown in a sea of AI content . Now if you look at it the other way and think , well , how can we do something different ?

The example of you know the weather results . You know , I can see a . I could see an instance where you could use AI in conjunction with weather data to produce really good weather reports . You could .

I could see a situation where it's not going to be long before you could actually have an AI weather presenter video of who will present you the weather in your area based on the forecast data the genuine forecast data and then using AI to interpret and create a weather forecast output so people can watch , get sort of hyper-personalised weather forecast for their

area , presented as if it's , you know , from a human , but it'd be like an AI generated human . That could be a really good example of using AI to create content that's high quality and useful for people . What I'm seeing you know as much as the SEO in me wants to find the shortcut create loads of content , get loads of traffic .

It becomes a zero sum game . There's only so much traffic outlets chase . If you have , say , I don't know , a lawnmower comparison website you want to do . You know lawnmower comparison . You could create huge amounts of AI content on lawn mowers .

Somebody else could be doing the same thing and as soon as you've got a few people producing that , you could have so much lawnmower content , but there's only so many people out there in the market for lawn mowers at any one time . There's only so much there to be consumed . You know there's only consumers to consume that content .

You can't create consumers by just creating lots of generic content like that . You have to actually do something new . So yeah , I mean , I think it's . I think it's still open season at the moment . I think there are a lot of people out there who are just creating very generic AI content and are ranking well at the moment .

But I think Google and other search engines are going to be working hard on this to try and work out what's good and what's not , and I think you're going to find this could be the next kind of big spam thing they've got to deal with in terms of how they surface the good content versus the not so good content .

So it doesn't have to be that you can't use AI . It's not . I don't think it's going to be situation where it's only human written content that's going to be the one that ranks .

I think there is going to be a place for AI , but I've just got the feeling it's not going to be this simple regurgitating thousands and thousands and thousands of WordPress posts , all very thin content and all just being the average of every other bit of content .

I think if you want to use AI I'm not saying you shouldn't , but if you want to , I think if you want to do it for the longer and you've got to think a little bit further than just creating what's replicas of the kind of websites we've built for years and years and years I think the next level is going to be where you need to go to to get AI in

there and to get that scale , but also that quality , in a way that Google is going to reward and not penalize .

But it's still early days with AI and Google , and I would just say go and read the document , see what it says to you and whether you think you agree with me or not , because , again , this is one of those things where there's still no fixed promises yet . There's a lot to play for . So go and read it and see what you think .

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Try it today for free at keywordspeopleusecom , if you want to get in touch , have any questions , I'd love to hear from you . I'm at Channel 5 on Twitter . You can email me at podcast at keywordspeopleusecom . Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO . Seo is not that hard .