More than 85% of digital marketing professionals are using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to create content or improve their processes, according to an AuthorityHacker study. This shows that it has become an ideal tool for generating content or improving the creation process.
Google labels AI-generated content as spam if it does not provide value to the user.
Google is aware of this and, in their own words, they believe that “the power of AI can transform the ability to provide useful information” and have shared certain details about how AI-generated content fits into their search strategy.
The goal of Google’s ranking algorithms is for original and high-quality content to appear at the top of search results pages. To achieve this, they use quality criteria called “E-E-A-T,” which stands for: experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness.
Google states that the algorithms focus on the quality of the content and not on how it is created. In fact, they point out that 10 years ago, with the mass adoption of the Internet, social networks, and the ease of creating and sharing content, no one thought to ban content generated by people.
Instead, search engines focused on creating algorithms that reward content quality, with constant updates to ranking algorithms to adapt to new ways of browsing the Internet and consuming content.
Does Google penalize AI-generated content?
Google is very clear in its policy: it allows the use of automatically generated content, as long as it provides value and meets its quality criteria, and penalizes it whenever it has been created artificially with the sole purpose of manipulating rankings in search results.
The company considers that the latter violates its spam policies and applies the label of “automatically generated misleading content.”
How to use AI-generated content without violating policies
Google itself acknowledges that not all automatically generated content is spam. In fact, it recognizes the usefulness of this type of content in sports results, weather forecasts, or the transcription of audio or video content.
To avoid penalties, the content must:
-Comply with E-E-A-T guidelines: The content must be reviewed and edited by someone with experience in the subject, provide value, and be clear and concise when conveying information to the reader.
-Label the content: If publishing AI-generated content, the user must know that it is artificial and automatically generated content. We must always answer the user’s question: “How was the content created?”
-Useful content: When asked “why was this content created?”, the answer should always be “to help people.” This means the content must be useful to users visiting the website. If the content is only to attract traffic, spam algorithms will detect it and label it as misleading content.
