@tjrobertson52

How does Google feel about AI content? This often comes up when I'm talking about using AI to create content for SEO purposes. People will say things like, won't Google be able to tell that the content was created using AI?

And first of all, no, Google's algorithm can't tell if something was created by AI. But two, it wouldn't matter if they could.

Google has said over and over again that they don't care how content is created. They care about the quality of the content. Is it actually helping users?

But the truth is, Google's algorithm not all that great at detecting the quality of a piece of content. It is getting better, and I think it's possible within the next few years that it'll get a lot better at detecting quality.

As of today, AI content can still rank very well as long as you do it in a smart way. In fact, there are many examples of websites putting out thousands of pieces of content using AI and doing really well before they inevitably lose all of their traffic. And now you might be thinking, wait, TJ, I thought you said Google doesn't care if you're using AI to create content.

Why would they be penalizing these websites? They use AI to create large amounts of content.

You see, the websites that are being penalized for this are being hit by what's called a Scaled content abuse penalty. And it's important to understand that like most penalties, this isn't something that the algorithm can detect. In fact, most Google penalties are put in place because the algorithm can't catch it.

In the case of scaled content abuse, the penalty comes when a human reviews a website and determines that they've been using some kind of system. It doesn't have to be AI to create a large amount of low quality content at scale.

So what does this mean for the typical website owner? It means don't create low quality content at scale. But when you're using AI the right way, the quality can improve, not get worse.