Does Google Penalize AI Content? Here’s Your Algorithm Survival Guide

With artificial intelligence making a splash across every industry—and an especially big one for digital marketing—agencies are increasingly looking to integrate AI into their processes. But does Google penalize AI content, and how far can you push the needle on generative AI use before you cross a line that causes issues with search ranking and SEO performance?

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Keep reading below to get the truth about AI content for SEO, including whether it's a good practice and whether Google will penalize pages and sites with AI content. 

Understanding Google's guidelines on AI content

Will Google penalize AI content? Whether you're starting an agency with no experience or scaling up lead-generating efforts with the help of AI, this is certainly a question you need answers to. Unfortunately, the feedback from Google is complex.

Google's current stance is that AI can be helpful, but content quality is still critical. 

To understand Google AI content expectations, you can look at Google's own objectives for creating AI applications (Google). While the tech giant uses these objectives to guide how it creates AI apps and other technology, you can use them as guidelines for whether AI content for SEO, social media marketing, and other purposes might hinder performance in search results. 

Some of Google's objectives for AI use include:

• Socially beneficial and accountable to people. Google is committed to AI use that is human-forward and provides value to people. The same should be true of any AI-generated content you publish. 
• Doesn't enforce existing biases or create new ones. Because AI uses existing content along with robust natural language processing programs and other technology to create new content, there's a risk that AI-generated content can repeat biases. It's important to review content to ensure this isn't the case.
• Supportive of privacy and safety. Your content marketing practices should always consider the privacy and safety of clients and consumers. This is good for business branding as well as SEO.
• Upholds high standards of excellence. Google is quite clear that it wants to provide the best possible results for every query, so high-quality content continues to perform better no matter how it was created. 

Should you use AI for content creation?

But is AI content good for SEO, and should you use it when creating content for your agency or clients? It's a decision each agency must make for itself after carefully weighing all the factors.

What are the pros and cons of using AI for content creation?

Image source: ChatGPT

As you can see from the image above, ChatGPT and other AI programs can create well-written, grammatically correct sentences. With the right prompts, AI even generates mostly human-sounding content. However, there are pros and cons to using this technology to create content.

When making the decision to use AI, what should businesses and content creators consider?

In addition to weighing the pros and cons of AI use for content creation, marketing agencies should consider factors unique to their organization. That includes:

• Client expectations about AI use. Your clients may not care about how you create content as long as it performs. Or, your clients may not want AI used at all. In most cases, clients fall somewhere between those extremes, and it's important to understand those expectations and whether you can use AI to meet them.
• Availability of staff to manage AI content generation. Many small agencies and businesses mistakenly think they can use AI to automate content creation with very little effort. While AI can help you scale without adding more writers to your projects, you still need experts to create prompts, train generative AI programs, and edit AI-generated content to meet quality expectations. 
• The type of content you create. AI doesn't work well for every type of content. It's typically less helpful in creating highly technical content, such as medical whitepapers, than it is in supporting general SEO content creation. 
• Ethical questions around AI use. Currently, there are a number of ethical concerns with making money with AI art and other uses of AI for commercial purposes. Lawmakers continue to delve into the legalities of such practices, which have created concerns around copyright and artists’ ownership of their work. Marketing agencies that consider AI use should ensure they understand the changing legal landscape.

How to not get penalized for AI content

One major consideration remains for marketing agencies: Is AI content bad for SEO because it will cause Google to treat your content in a negative fashion?

Can Google detect AI content?

By Google's own admission, it can't really detect AI content. In fact, developing a tool that can determine whether content is AI-generated or human-generated seems to be a favorite startup idea in the tech industry in 2023 and 2024. Still, most of the existing tools have a high level of inaccuracy.

Google's current stance is this: The search engine doesn't care how you create content. It cares about whether it's good, high-quality content that will serve the reader. 

What does AI-generated content that complies with Google’s guidelines look like?

Image source: Google

Google is very transparent about what it considers to be high-quality content. According to Google Search Central, content should:

• Provide original information, analysis, and thought. High-quality content doesn’t just regurgitate what other pages say; it adds its own value. 
• Be comprehensive. A high-ranking page in the search engine is one that Google feels fully answers the intent of the searcher’s query.
• Not plagiarize. Google doesn’t look kindly on content that simply duplicates what’s already out there.
• Not be clickbait. The promise in the page title and subheadings should be answered by the content.
• Be grammatically correct. Google wants to serve up high-quality pages that are free of major spelling and grammar errors.
• Be trustworthy. Google is most interested in providing links to authoritative, trustworthy content, especially in niches like finance or healthcare, where expertise is necessary. 

What strategies ensure content is high-quality and valuable to readers?

To integrate AI processes while ensuring that you continue to create high-quality, valuable content that has a chance at performing well in search engines, it’s important to integrate a few best practices.

Some tips for optimizing AI content for better SEO results while avoiding penalties include:

• Taking time to humanize AI content. Avoid moving straight from AI generation to publishing content. Build in editing processes to humanize content. This should be more than a pass for grammar. Employ human writers and researchers to fact check AI content, add human insights and quotes, and update content to match specific brand voice and style requirements. 
• Leveraging white label software. Look for ways to integrate existing technical processes so you don't have to build your AI content workflows from the ground up. For example, Vendasta has tried-and-true AI for social marketing campaigns that can reduce the time your team needs to spend managing Facebook or Instagram content and communities. 
• Using AI to repurpose existing content. Content creation can often feel repetitive, especially when you're managing marketing across numerous channels. You might want the same information for a blog post, email, Facebook post, Instagram story, and LinkedIn update. Consider whether you can create high-quality content once before feeding it into AI and asking the program to parse out social media posts and potential email marketing messages. 
• Leveraging AI to support human content creators. Think about ways that you can use AI to reduce tedium and labor for your human content creators. For example, AI can help you generate outlines for blog posts or come up with new content ideas for certain keywords. You don’t have to have AI write the final product for it to be invaluable in the content creation process. 

Does Google Penalize AI Content — Final Takeaways

No, Google does not automatically penalize content because AI created it. Google can't really tell—and doesn’t actually care—who or what created content. The search engine's main priority is the quality of the content.

As long as you are using processes that ensure high-quality outputs, the types of marketing integration you use, including AI, are up to you. By taking time to consider all the ramifications of AI use and developing processes to humanize that content before publishing it, you can scale SEO content services with AI without worrying about automatic Google penalties.