A recent study from Ahrefs said that AI-generated content does not hurt your Google rankings. And while the study really shows this to be true, there are plenty of sites that overdid it with AI-generated content and saw their Google rankings massively decline in the long run.
The study looked at 600,000 pages, 100,000 random keywords and the top 20 ranking URLs and came up with the conclusion that "86.5% of top-ranking pages contain some amount of AI-generated content."
The key here is "some" and of course, you don't know how good the AI-detection is (not saying it isn't good but still, I don't know).
Here is the data from the study:
- 4.6% of pages were categorized as “pure AI.”
- 13.5% were categorized as “pure human.”
- 81.9% were categorized as a mix of two.
They even broke down the level of mixed AI:
- 13.8% showed minimal AI use (1-10% of the page content was categorized as AI)
- 40% showed moderate AI use (11-40%)
- 20.3% showed substantial AI use (41%-70%)
- 7.8% showed dominant AI use (71%-99%)
Here is a pie chart showing how it all ranked:
As a reminder, Google softened its stance on AI content and translated content using AI.
Glenn Gabe then shared some examples of a site that got destroyed for overdoing it with AI-generated content:
Please do not read this post and run to publish AI-generated content at scale. There is nuance with this topic that I believe the post misses... There are many examples of sites that got destroyed via broad core updates or spam updates that went down the path of heavily using AI… pic.twitter.com/uf2Wic2XiR
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) July 7, 2025
Personally, I almost never use AI to write my content here. If I do, I would document that, which I've done I think twice before. I also think if I used AI to write the content on this site, you would all pick up on it in a second. Not that it is a bad thing, assuming I review and validate what AI wrote. But it wouldn't have my personality and brevity that I use for my content. Oh, plus, I know you all love the typos.
If you are going to use AI, use it in a responsible way and don't just use it 100% for all your content and never look at the content before it is published.
Forum discussion at X.
