Key takeaways
- Google targets content mass-produced to manipulate rankings, not AI-assisted writing itself.
- Sudden jumps from dozens to thousands of thin pages look automated and get treated as spam.
- Audit recent content, slow down on scaling, and strengthen experience, expertise, authority and trust.
Transcript
Google isn’t banning AI content, but it is targeting how it’s being used. If you’re scaling your website without strategy, you are in trouble. Today, I want to talk about something that’s been making a lot of noise in the SEO world: Google and AI content. More specifically, is Google punishing websites that use AI to scale their content?
For the last couple years or so, there’s been this massive surge in AI-generated content all across the internet. Everyone from marketers to billion-dollar brands have been using tools like ChatGPT, Jasper and Claude to pump out hundreds, sometimes thousands of web pages at scale. And at first, it worked. AI content was ranking, traffic was going up, and SEOs were celebrating. But fast forward to now, and a lot of those same sites are tanking. Why? It’s because Google isn’t just looking at how content is created. It’s looking at why and for what purpose. And that’s where the real issue comes in.
Let’s break that down using Google’s own documentation. First and foremost, Google recently updated their spam policy pages and added their stance on scaled content. It explicitly warns against using automation to generate lots of content with the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings. This is a major change to the SEO game and should really be taken into account by anyone with a website. Now, of course, this does specify content that isn’t helping users. So, if you have an FAQ page, helpful articles written by people, or other positive SEO content, you’ll most likely be safe from this Google update.
Of course, it’s not that all AI content is automatically bad for SEO. Google does specify using generative AI tools to generate many pages without adding value to the users. But if you’re publishing tons of low-value content just to win keywords, it is spam. Not low quality, not borderline: spam.
Now, let’s talk about Google’s helpful content update, which was deployed around 2022. This is where things get very nuanced. Google says its goal is to reward content that is written for people, not for search engines. And here’s where AI becomes tricky. Because AI can write for people, but it can also write at scale with little human input. So what does this mean in practice? It means that Google is also watching for signs that a website is pumping out content too fast, too broadly, and without depth. Think about it. If your site suddenly goes from 50 pages to 2,000 in a month, all targeting random long-tail keywords, what is Google going to think? It’s going to look automated and it’s going to look like, again, spam.
Now, Google has said that page experience isn’t a single ranking factor anymore. If your content is relevant enough, it’s fine. Page experience now acts more like a framework of sorts. A reminder that good content might not be enough if the user experience is bad. For example, if your page loads slowly, doesn’t answer user questions well, has a poor design, or is stuffed with ads, that is a bad page experience, and Google will use that to demote your site. The same now applies to mass AI content generation. If you’re using AI to assist your writing process, edit drafts, or support research, that is totally fine. But again, if you’re using it to mass-produce the majority of a website just to farm traffic, that’s a problem. And we’ve already seen it happen with a ton of sites.
Ultimately, Google has shifted and continues to hone in on what we’ve been recommending for over 15 years. As a one-stop shop marketing agency, we design websites for our clients. And as a result, we have to stay on top of things like search trends, keywords, and fairly big updates to Google’s SEO, just like this one. We’ve always taken the approach to prioritize quality over quantity and grow our clients’ websites by hand with plenty of human input. As such, we’ve been largely unaffected by these Google changes. And thankfully, this approach has been proven to be beneficial not only for us, but our clients as well.
At the end of the day, what can you do to combat these SEO changes? First, audit your content. Look at what you’ve published over the last 6 to 12 months. Is it useful for the viewer? Is it original? Is it written mostly by human input? If not, we do recommend consolidating, pruning or fully rewriting so that there is a human intent. Second, slow down on the scaling. Quality is going to beat quantity every single time and Google is clearly signaling just that. Third, lean into your E-E-A-T: your experience, expertise, authority, and trust. Add bylines, show credentials, add links to real sources, include personal experiences within your articles. Because from what we’ve learned, the future of SEO isn’t just AI versus humans. It’s humans plus AI. The sites that use the two thoughtfully will be the ones that win long term. Not only for helping scalability, but for providing real, useful, helpful information as well.
Want help putting this into practice? See SEO for Financial Advisors.
