Does Google Penalise AI-Generated Content?

Your preferred AI tool has been in overdrive and your business blog articles are ready to

upload. With a few tweaks, they sound OK and have cost you nothing but time and prompt-

power.

But a question is lurking: does Google penalise AI-generated content? Will your posts

appear in the search engine at all, never mind the giddy heights of Page 1? I’ll reluctantly

gloss over the ethics here… that’s for a whole other post.

Read on to discover whether you might be sending your mainly machine-written words into

an SEO black hole.

What does Google say about ranking AI content?

Google Search's guidance about AI-generated content isn’t as clearcut as a simple yes or no.

Instead, their policy – last updated in February 2023 – is focused around the main idea of

“rewarding high-quality content, however it is produced.” So yes, human and AI-generated

content can rank highly – with a caveat. More on that later.

Ask Chat GPT – if you have to – to expand on this and it’ll tell you:

“If you use AI to create high-quality, original, and user-focused content, you're good. If you use it to churn out generic or SEO-only filler, expect trouble.”

(And yes, I’ve had to sit on my hands not to delete the Oxford comma in that answer.)

What does “high-quality content” mean?

If you want your content to rank highly – and we all know fabulous findability on the world’s

biggest search engine is the holy grail of marketing – it needs to pass the E-E-A-T test.

Meaning that once identified, relevant content needs to demonstrate aspects of:

• experience

• expertise

• authoritativeness

• trustworthiness

In other words, the copy connected to your business needs to be original, helpful and offer

value.

And if you rely solely on Chat GPT to do that, your SEO is immediately compromised

because as copywriter Tom Albrighton says in his book AI Can’t Write But You Can: “The

best you can hope for is a sort of plausible average of stuff that other people have said in

the past.”

People-first not search-engine first

Google is very clear that any content designed to manipulate rankings in search will be

penalised as it violates their spam policies. That means either ranking lower or being

deindexed, i.e. vanishing forever into the abyss of abysmal content.

Instead, your business copy needs crafting to be people-first rather than search-engine first.

It has to tell unique stories, express ideas with colour and connection, and sound precisely

like your brand or organisation.

And doing that takes both time and skill – one or both of which you may not have in

abundance. Step forward an AI copy editor who can add the essential human elements to

please the E-E-A-T formula.

The proof is in the stats

It’s easy to get lost in the oodles of stats out there about AI copy. To save you from the

rabbit hole, here’s a simple one that demonstrates the importance of balancing using AI

with incorporating real human perspective.

In late 2024, SEO analysis platform Semrush surveyed over 700 business owners, marketers

and CEOs about their experience of using AI for SEO-optimised content.

When asked how they enrich and improve that content, top of the list at 69% is ‘human

editors review and refine our AI-generated content’. A further 60% say they ‘humanise’ their

AI content to sound less robotic and 43% say they improve the readability of their AI

content.

Pleasing confirmation that a simple way to avoid Google penalising your AI content is to

work alongside a human editor who knows how to refine, finesse and personalise.

As Harvard professor of psychology Steven Pinker says: “The demand for authenticity is

even stronger for intellectual products like stories and editorials: the awareness that there’s

a real human you can connect it to changes its status and its acceptability.”

Work with a human copy editor