Is AI- content No Longer against Search Guidelines? Google Clarifies

Google has finally clarified its stance on the role of AI content, which is potentially good news for website owners. On February 8, 2023, the search engine published a post, ‘Google Search’s Guidance About Ai-Generated Content’, announcing that AI content isn’t against its guidelines. With this, Google redrafted its prior stand on AI content and how Google Search won’t rank it.

Google remarked that AI content isn’t inherently against its guidelines but can be used effectively for search.

With all the buzz around AI-generated content in search,  website owners may have some questions:

• Does AI content meet Google’s guidelines?
• Is using AI content a violation that leads to ranking declines?

To be precise, the search engine has nothing to do with who or what writes your content as long as that content is for people and not for ranking purposes. Also, AI-generated content isn’t inherently against its guidelines and can be used for search.

But, focus on people-first content (helpful content) will be the priority. According to Google, helpful content demonstrates good E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness). And this is what differentiates helpful content from AI content written mainly for search engines, which is unhelpful for humans.

To succeed in Google Search, you must produce high-quality, original, people-first content demonstrating E-E-A-T qualities.

E-E-A-T Considerations for AI Content:

Google rank systems aim to reward original high-quality content that demonstrates qualities of E-E-A-T: expertise, experience, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. AI isn’t human. It’s always on the flip side compared to content created legitimately by humans.

Artificial Intelligence cannot give first-hand experience, real emotions and qualities compared to human content. Let’s come to the new “Ë” added by Google, which refers to “Experience”. Yeah! Google is talking about real-life experiences. AI-created content cannot give real-life experiences.

Source: Twitter

Only real content creators can provide real-life experiences in their content. Google emphasises real-life experiences in content, which can give fruitful results to website administrators.

Google’s ranking system is specially designed to surface reliable information through the helpful content system, which targets content that seems to have been primarily created for ranking well in search engines rather than to help or inform people.

Automation in Content Generation:

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As said earlier, creating AI Content to manipulate ranking in search results violates Google’s spam policies.

Google stated that it’s essential to know that not all use of automation(including AI Content generation) is spam. Automation has been used for generating content such as weather forecasts, sports scores and transcripts.

On the flip side, ChatGPT can answer almost any question and provides code blocks in several different programming languages, tabular data, formulas, translations, and more. But the drawback is the shortcomings in the content generated by ChatGPT or other content-generation tools.

• AI tools like ChatGPT can produce content with outdated information.
• It can’t provide in-depth, fresh and expert-level insights on topics.
• Plus, AI  cannot produce that first-hand experience.

How to incorporate AI into an SEO Strategy?

Every industry is now unlocking the potential of AI. With the incorporation of AI tools that fulfil the requirements and minimise the efforts

With the incorporation of AI, every industry is now unlocking the potential of AI to gain a competitive advantage. Such AI tools have had a significant impact on the SEO industry, as they have improved the process of crafting and developing effective SEO strategies. There are creative ways experts are utilising AI tools like ChatGPT for SEO.

It’s essential to include AI content with some limitations. Content creators should ensure that their AI-generated content is helpful to the audience.

However, there are multiple areas where AI content can be beneficial.

SEO experts are using ChatGPT to create summaries of their content, generate content for product or category descriptions, create meta descriptions and basic keyword research tasks, produce content ideas and create editorial calendars. Moreover, the tool is also being used for generating structured data, robots.txt commands, and XML sitemap, excel formulas, Schema Data, regular expressions, and other types of code.

Frequently Asked Questions

Google also published a list of FAQs on Google Search’s guidance about AI-generated content.

Is AI content against Google Search’s guidelines?

No, provided the content has been generated to help people, not to manipulate search rankings.

Why isn’t Google Search banning AI-generated content?

Because automation is being used for creating helpful content in exciting new ways.

How does Search determine whether AI is being used for spam search results?

Google has several systems, such as SpamBrain that analyzes patterns and signals. This enables the search engine to identify spam content. However, it is produced.

Will AI content now rank highly on Search?

No, you’ll not earn any special gains. It’s just content. If the content is useful, helpful, original, and satisfies aspects of E-E-A-T, it might do well in Search.

Should I use AI for generating content?

Yes. But make sure the content is unique, useful, helpful and original.