Seemingly overnight, ChatGPT, Bard by Google, and other AI tools have taken the internet by storm. These tools are particularly impressive in terms of the sheer volume of content that they can create in a matter of seconds. That has led many people and companies with websites to ask does AI-generated content rank on Google and, if the answer is yes, how this changes the content creation game.
Does AI-generated content rank on Google? Yes, it can. Google has been quite clear on this. Its goal is to reward the best content available on the internet whether it’s created by a person, or an AI tool. There are two important nuances here to consider, however. The first is that Google doesn’t necessarily take a stance on AI as a content creator but rather wants to avoid the issue of evaluating who wrote what and judging content based on that. The other nuance is that Google does take a stance on using AI to manipulate search results, which remains a violation of its spam policy.
Any discussion concerning whether AI-generated content ranks on Google should focus on the quality of the content. The answer is that high-quality AI-generated content does rank, and that’s an important point. While AI tools are quite impressive, they still leave a lot to be desired when it comes to demonstrating the values that Google targets: expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. The human concept of content is still invaluable in order to ensure that the content is accurate, digestible, and appropriately targeted at the other humans who will be searching for that information.
If we presume that most of the AI-generated content is below Google’s standard for high quality, then this begs the question of whether AI tools running amok are going to create a problem for us all. The answer is not really, or at least not more than the challenges Google already faces. Since people first recognized that you can make money online, people and bots have been spamming the internet with worthless content at a volume that no human alone could match. It’s the chief reason that Google shifted its focus to high-quality content, and while there may be more of it now, the fundamental challenge that Google must overcome remains the same: deliver relevant and accurate results to its users.
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