The launch of ChatGPT in late 2022 catapulted generative artificial intelligence (AI) into the mainstream. ChatGPT reached the 100 million users milestone in just two months, triggering discussions around the impact of generative AI on human work and creativity.
Generative AI systems can generate text, based on prompts that are written in natural language. This essentially offers the ability to automate much of the content creation process. For those of us working in content marketing and SEO, one of the first questions that came to mind was: does AI content rank in Google?
In a sentence: AI content that conforms with SEO fundamentals and is considered as helpful to users can rank in Google’s results pages.
In this guide to AI content, we break down Google’s official stance on auto-generated content, and explain how taking a ‘people-first’ approach that follows SEO best practices is the way you can use AI to help you write content that ranks.
Jump to:
- Can AI-generated content rank in Google?
- Google’s stance on AI content, and why it might rank
- Why is my AI-generated content not ranking?
- How to use AI to help write content that ranks
- Our say on AI content
Can AI-generated content rank in Google?
When it comes to ranking content, Google’s primary concern is serving useful content that effectively satisfies users’ search intent.
Google doesn’t necessarily differentiate between content that is created manually by humans and content that’s been automatically generated using AI. Instead, Google focuses on differentiating between low quality and high quality content.
Does AI content rank in Google’s SERPs?
So, the marketing-dollar question: does AI content rank in Google? The short answer is YES, AI-generated content can rank in Google’s results pages. However, there is a ‘but’. And that is that low quality AI-generated content has no chance of ranking in the SERPs.
Google’s stance on AI content, and why it might rank
In light of the rapid adoption of generative AI systems, Google released updated guidance on how Google Search evaluates content, including content that is created using AI.
There are a few key points to be aware of.
High quality content is key
The quality of a piece of content, in terms of its helpfulness to the user, is more important than the methods used to produce the content.
Google’s quality assessment begins with algorithms such as SpamBrain, which are specifically designed to combat shallow and spammy content. Google considers spam content as any content that has been created with the intention of manipulating search rankings.
Google’s spam detection systems look for black hat SEO techniques such as content scraping and hidden links, however, they can also be triggered by common mistakes such as keyword stuffing. See the beefound.agency SEO Checklist for tips on how to write high quality SEO content that won’t get flagged by Google’s anti-spam systems.
Quality and usefulness are based on E-E-A-T
E-E-A-T is an acronym standing for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. You can think of E-E-A-T as Google’s 4 pillars of high quality and useful content.
Content that scores well in terms of E-E-A-T is more likely to rank in the SERPs on Google.
Experience
Does the author demonstrate their practical experience with the topic they’re writing about?
- Google values original content highly and there’s no better way to demonstrate originality than sharing your own first-hand experiences, learnings and opinions.
Expertise
Are you writing on a topic that you have some level of proven expertise in?
- For example, as a digital marketing agency with over 5 years of experience helping our clients rank for tens of thousands of keywords, here at beefound.agency we write about digital marketing and SEO.
Authoritativeness
Reputation is important to Google. Authoritativeness is a measure of your reputation within your industry.
- Google considers authoritativeness across three axes: the author, the content, and the website itself.
- The quality of your backlink profile is a measure of your website’s authority whilst the number of links to a piece of content is an obvious measure of its authority.
- The author’s level of authority is based on their expertise score or referrals/citations from peers.
Trustworthiness
Google considers trustworthiness as the most important aspect of E-E-A-T. A piece of content doesn’t have to score highly in all aspects of E-E-A-T to rank highly, but it does have to be considered as trustworthy.
- Trustworthiness is improved by providing accurate information, citing respected sources (that are also considered as reliable), and following user-friendly practices like having encryption on your website, like a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Certificate.
Who, how & why
With the growth of AI content in 2023, Google has simplified the E-E-A-T guidelines by advising content creators to evaluate their content by asking: Who, How, and Why?
- Who — Google advises making it clear to the reader who authored a piece of content. This simply requires you to add bylines or author attribution to each piece of content. Author attribution or bylines can link to your website’s About Us or Our Team page, as we do at beefound.
- How — essentially, this is about being transparent about your content creation process. When it comes to AI content, Google advises creators to share details on the extent to which AI was used in the process; from AI-assisted, to AI-generated, and fully automated content creation.
- Why — this is a reminder of the people-first principle. Set out to create high quality content that readers are likely to find useful rather than search-engine-first content.
Why is my AI-generated content not ranking?
Keep this next point in mind when using AI as part of your content creation process: in Google’s eyes, AI-generated content is just content.
The extent to which AI was used to generate a piece of content is not the issue.*
According to Google, the likelihood of a piece of AI-generated content ranking well in Google depends on whether or not it…
“…is useful, helpful, original, and satisfies aspects of E-E-A-T, it might do well in Search. If it doesn’t, it might not.”
*In the interests of producing high quality content, at beefound, we strongly recommend you don’t publish auto-generated content. Remember that it’s usually those who use automation, or publish auto-generated content, that fall foul of Google’s spam policies.
E-E-A-T, no spam
If your content aligns with the E-E-A-T guidelines, and you go through the Who, How, Why process, your content is unlikely to violate Google’s spam policies.
Keep in mind that spammy content, no matter if it’s created with AI or not, will not rank in Google.
Google Search’s spam policy considers the following types of content to be spammy;
- written content that doesn’t make sense to the reader but contains search keywords;
- automatically translated text that has not been edited or reviewed by a human before publication;
- any written content generated through an automated process that has no regard for quality or the user experience;
- texts that exclusively use automated techniques for synonymising, paraphrasing other creators’ content;
- written content that is generated exclusively through scraping social feeds or search results;
- combining or ‘stitching’ content from multiple web pages without adding additional value or originality
So to summarise, your AI-generated content will never rank if it doesn’t demonstrate the qualities of E-E-A-T or is in violation of Google’s spam policies.
If you want to increase the chances of your AI-generated content ranking you should E-E-A-T no spam.
How to use AI to help write content that ranks
Generative AI systems and tools are used by hundreds of millions of creators and small businesses on a daily basis. As well as ChatGPT, AI platforms like Jasper and Copy AI are specifically designed for creating written content.
Generally speaking, using AI won’t give your content any special gains. However, AI does have the potential to speed up the content creation process.
As a matter of fact, we see AI as a tool that complements our existing processes. For example, we use AI systems for;
- researching specific topics;
- coming up with new content ideas, and;
- reviewing our content for grammatical suggestions during the editing process.
The only way of using AI to write content that ranks is to publish valuable content that users find helpful. You’ll also need to align as closely as possible with the E-E-A-T guidelines and write content that follows SEO best practices. For more on using AI to write effective SEO content, see our guide to ChatGPT SEO.
Our say on AI content
Ultimately, generative AI systems are only as powerful as the person who is using them.
At this point in time, AI is like all other forms of technology: an extension of the user. AI systems are great for coming up with new angles or ideas that can help overcome writer’s block.
So, by all means, use AI to enhance your content creation process; but know that writing high quality content will always rely on human creativity, manual processes and a fair bit of editing.
Our bespoke SEO services take the pain out of your SEO efforts. We help businesses nail down the SEO fundamentals and implement best practices, whilst handling all aspects of content creation.
We’re only a quick email or call away, so give us a ‘buzz’ with any and all questions on SEO or AI content.
