Thanks to advancements in natural language processing and machine learning, AI-generated content has quickly become a mainstay of the online world. For businesses and creators, the advantages are obvious—namely, faster content production and scale. But in spite of its benefits, many marketers remain hesitant to test the waters because of the belief that Google penalizes AI-generated content. 

The reality, though? Google doesn’t penalize websites for publishing AI-generated content. Below, we explain what Google’s algorithms actually consider for search rankings and how you can leverage AI to achieve meaningful SEO results.

What does Google actually say about AI-generated content?

Google has long prioritized high-quality, relevant content, having established its E-A-T guidelines in 2014. The guidelines, which have since evolved to become E-E-A-T, represent expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness—four pillars that take precedence over how a piece of content is created. 

In fact, according to Google:

“Our focus on the quality of content, rather than how content is produced, is a useful guide that has helped us deliver reliable, high quality results to users for years.”

In other words, whether content is created by AI or humans is not the determining factor of search performance. Instead, Google’s ranking systems reward content that demonstrates value, originality, and relevance to the user.

How does automation and AI factor into this? 

Google’s guidelines make clear that the use of AI or automation for the sole purpose of manipulating search rankings violates its spam policies. The type of content described in this case amounts to scaled content abuse, or practices “focused on creating large amounts of unoriginal content that provides little to no value to users, no matter how it's created.” 

Note that the end of Google’s definition points out that human-generated content can also be guilty of scaled content abuse. This reaffirms Google’s earlier guidance that a piece of content’s means of creation are not as important as the content’s actual value.

Consider long-time tools like article spinners, which simply reword existing text with synonyms. The kinds of content created by these tools, designed to trick search engines, are where AI crosses the line into spam territory.

But just as AI can be used to create meaningless fluff, it can also do the opposite: improve content. 

Google acknowledges this by calling out specific areas like sports and meteorology as examples of where AI has added value: 

“It's important to recognize that not all use of automation, including AI generation, is spam. Automation has long been used to generate helpful content, such as sports scores, weather forecasts, and transcripts. AI has the ability to power new levels of expression and creativity, and to serve as a critical tool to help people create great content for the web.”

The bottom line: It’s not the method of creation that matters, but the quality and helpfulness of the content.

The Origins of AI Content’s Bad Reputation

If Google doesn’t actually penalize AI-generated content, then why is this misconception so prevalent? And can Google even detect AI-generated content in the first place?

To be clear, yes, Google and third-party tools have developed sophisticated methods to identify AI-generated text. Using natural language processing algorithms, these tools can analyze patterns and language structures to flag content that seems artificially produced. 

However, once again, detection alone isn’t what triggers penalties—it's whether the content fails to meet quality standards.

It isn’t hard to pinpoint when AI-generated content began flooding the search landscape. In a study of employment outcomes, freelancers offering writing-related services saw a sharp decline in employment and earnings months after ChatGPT’s release in November 2022. 

Around the same timeframe, major brands also came into the spotlight for publishing AI-generated content. For instance:

• BuzzFeed drew ridicule in early 2023 for its AI-created travel guides, described by one journalist as “comically bland and similar to one another.” 

• CNET’s attempts at using generative AI to create personal finance content—which required many post-publishing corrections—were lambasted by The Washington Post as a “journalistic disaster.” 

• Sports Illustrated backpedaled and deleted its articles after getting called out for not only generating poorly written AI content but also publishing them under fake author profiles.

The negative press and backlash surrounding these early low-quality examples undermined the use of AI in content creation. They also gave rise to the myth that Google would penalize such content, an idea that was reinforced further by Google’s March 2024 core update. Because of its drastic ranking fluctuations and volatility, the update sparked debate over whether AI-generated content was targeted.

When the update was first announced, however, Google made no mention of AI. Instead, it explained:

“This update involves refining some of our core ranking systems to help us better understand if webpages are unhelpful, have a poor user experience or feel like they were created for search engines instead of people. This could include sites created primarily to match very specific search queries.”

Given the update’s primary goal to tackle spam and unhelpful content then, it wasn’t the use of AI that led to ranking fluctuations, but rather, the quality of content it generated. In other words, Google penalized low-quality content created with AI for being spammy or unhelpful—not because it was created with AI.

3 principles for creating valuable and original content with AI

As we’ve established, the use of AI does not trigger a Google penalty by default. 

On the contrary, AI can be used to produce content that matches, or even surpasses, what a human writer can deliver. The key lies in leveraging AI as a tool to enhance content creation, rather than replace it entirely. 

To amplify your content strategy with AI, we offer three guiding principles below.

1. Incorporate unique, first-party data 

Every December since 2016, Spotify launches its beloved AI-powered Wrapped campaign, which lets users discover what songs, musicians, and genres they’ve listened to most over the past year. This rich user data is unique to Spotify—no other company has access—and that’s exactly what makes it so valuable.

Spotify isn’t the only brand turning its proprietary data into meaningful content. Canva has similarly built a content flywheel by repurposing user-generated content as templates. As users create more templates with the platform, Canva leans on AI to generate corresponding "templates for [x]" pages.

As Canva’s user base grows, so does its dataset, allowing the platform to generate more valuable and diverse content. This strategy creates a self-sustaining cycle where more data leads to better content, attracting even more users.

Applied to your own content strategy, consider: 

• What unique data does your company have access to that others do not? 

• What value does that data offer to your audience?

Without any unique data of its own, AI can’t produce much original value—only predictable cookie-cutter ideas derived from its original training datasets. But paired with your unique information, it can certainly help turn your data into more meaningful value.

2. Simplify complex data

Naturally, rich data can be very complex—think long spreadsheets and poorly formatted tables with hard-to-parse information. This is where AI shines.

For instance, take a look at how Zillow consolidates information about mortgage rates and lenders in templated mortgage pages.

These pages help home buyers easily compare mortgage rates by location or loan type in one cohesive spot, rather than having to research that information across different pages on their own.

Here are a few other examples of how AI can help distill complicated information into digestible content:

• G2 automatically collects information about software features, pricing, and reviews to produce robust product pages. Since the platform offers a one-stop shop for research and comparison, users don’t have to manually jump around between software sites to do their own research.

• AdQuick, which specializes in out-of-home ad buying, uses AI to automate the creation of city-specific pages about billboard advertising stats, like this one about San Francisco. The pages help AdQuick’s target audience (advertisers) understand a location’s potential campaign ROI.  

• The cybersecurity company Twingate breaks down complex and urgent security breaches to educate readers, like in its article "What Happened in the Apollo Data Breach?" Straightforward headings, clean formatting, and actionable steps make its content much easier to learn from than long news commentary. 

• The clinical trial platform Power simplifies information from dense government databases like ClinicalTrials.gov, making clinical trial data more accessible for everyday readers. 

This ability to transform raw data into a user-friendly format illustrates AI’s power in automatically summarizing or simplifying large volumes of information with relatively minimal effort. 

3. Add human insights

One common reason why AI-generated content often fails to impress is its lack of originality. This is because relying only on the baseline data it was trained on, AI regurgitates old and familiar ideas instead of delivering fresh and novel insights.

So while AI can efficiently generate the backbone of an article, it lacks the depth, nuance, and creativity that come from lived experiences and personal expertise. In this way, adding human perspectives can elevate a piece of AI content.

For an example, take a look at LinkedIn’s articles. The platform combines AI-generated and human-contributed content to get the best of both worlds, though there’s admittedly still room for improvement.

Just like our first guideline advises integrating first-party data with AI into your content efforts, you can do the same with your own unique insights. Consider:

• Do you have a contrarian opinion about a subject? 

• What new angle or perspective can you approach a topic from?

• Is there an unusual personal experience that you can relate to the topic?

AI can complement human creativity, but it ultimately cannot replace it. To that end, effective AI content creation will always depend on some level of human involvement to refine and personalize it for authenticity and originality.

Wrap-up

With the right guidance, AI can be a powerful tool for creating and scaling genuinely valuable content. So long as the primary goal is to deliver value to users, Google and other search engines won’t penalize AI-generated content. 

At daydream, we’ve seen firsthand how AI-driven content strategies can accelerate organic growth, particularly when using programmatic SEO. If you're ready to unlock the full potential of AI for your content strategy, reach out to us at thenukak@withdaydream.com.