AI Impact on Search: Can Google Detect AI Tools?

With all the buzz on AI-generated copy and design tools, we’re all wondering the same unspoken question: Can Google detect AI tools? Is this…allowed? Or looked down upon? With more and more companies beginning to leverage AI-powered tools for their marketing needs we are all wondering whether speed and efficiency may come at the cost of SERP rankings. 

The answers to these questions are muddled, but here’s what we do know: Google itself relies on advanced algorithms and machine learning to detect and evaluate the quality of website content. The entire purpose of search engines is to provide users with the most relevant and useful content possible, hence our society has become so search engine dependent on everything from research to daily needs. Google algorithms are designed to identify and flag low-quality or spammy content.

Google’s spam policy stance defines “Spammy automatically generated (or “auto-generated”) content as content that’s been generated programmatically without producing anything original or adding sufficient value; instead, it’s been generated for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings and not helping users.”

Historically, auto-generated content generated by machine learning scrips has had a reputation of being lower quality and overstuffed with keywords aimed at manipulating Google’s search results. This has led Google initiatives to detect this type of content and remove it from the SERPs in an attempt to preserve the integrity of its search results for the end user. 

Google Search Central has stated that “scraping content, even with some modification, is against our spam policy.” As well as confirming that Google has put implemented, “…many algorithms to go after such behaviors and demote site scraping content from other sites.”

Prioritizing high-quality, human-generated content on Google results provides a better search experience for users and maintains their credibility. But with the rise of the new AI tools that promise more natural and higher quality outputs, marketers and writers have the opportunity to utilize these tools to generate higher quality, more helpful content for the users rather than an endless amount of spam content. Quality over quantity has become the universal goal for AI generators and users. 

Therefore, the content generated by GPT-3 and other AI language models like ChatGPT, is at risk of being detected as machine-generated and flagged by Google’s algorithms. Like recognizes like, so there’s a good chance that machine learning algorithms will recognize similar machine learning. As far as technology has come, it will never be a complete substitute for human intellect. The writing style, grammar, and sentence structure of AI-generated content are often not as natural or accurate as human-generated content.

Editing has become the name of the AI game. It’s important to make sure that any content generated by AI models like ChatGPT is carefully reviewed and edited by a real person before being published on your website. This helps ensure that it meets Google’s quality standards and policies, and accurately reflects the subject. If you are choosing to leverage AI tools on your website it’s important to make sure that your website is balanced with plenty of original and unique content, so that it complies with Google’s policies in terms of user experience, design, and navigability.

Whether or not search engine consequences currently exist for websites leveraging AI-generated content has not been confirmed, nor denied by Google. For any company seeking to rank high in search engine results, it’s better to be safe than sorry and maintain a close human eye on your SEO strategy, from content to keyword selection. Contact Bluetext for more information on our expert search engine optimization services.