Since the October Spam update and the helpful content update, many SEOs are saying AI-generated content is being targeted by Google. The answer, as I said previously, is not really. Danny Sullivan from Google said again, it is not about if a human or a machine wrote it but rather if the content is helpful. But in general, Danny said content by the people for the people is what makes the content generally helpful.
Danny said on Twitter "We haven't said AI content is bad. We've said, pretty clearly, content written primarily for search engines rather than humans is the issue." Danny added, "If someone fires up 100 humans to write content just to rank, or fires up a spinner, or a AI, same issue..." That specific type of case we covered here.
Then Danny went on to add that generally it is "unlikely some AI content is going to feel written by people without some degree of human review." He said it is important for the content to be written "*by people* for people in our post about improvements like the helpful content system." "So if you're an SEO trying to figure out how AI fits in with being successful or not on Google, you're too focused on the tool not the content. Is the content you're producing helpful, reliable and people-first in nature? That's what we're looking for," he explained.
Here are those tweets, but click through to see the full thread:
We haven't said AI content is bad. We've said, pretty clearly, content written primarily for search engines rather than humans is the issue. That's what we're focused on. If someone fires up 100 humans to write content just to rank, or fires up a spinner, or a AI, same issue...
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) November 7, 2022
So if you're an SEO trying to figure out how AI fits in with being successful or not on Google, you're too focused on the tool not the content. Is the content you're producing helpful, reliable and people-first in nature? That's what we're looking for: https://t.co/rIKwa9fs7R
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) November 7, 2022
So no, Google is not specifically looking for AI content. Like we covered earlier some sites just doing a really poor job of machine generated content are also being hit. Google is just better at understanding when content is spammy or low quality, when content is helpful or not, and then the rankings should represent that. Google is not perfect and I am sure you all can share examples of AI generated content doing well but hey, just a few months ago Google said machine generated content is not good enough yet. As you may remember, for the past several years, Google has been saying that when machine generated or AI generated content becomes high quality, it might be something that Google allows within its search webmaster guidelines.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
Update: One more tidbit, I joked about this and Danny had a nice quotable response:
If someone is asking themselves how to make content more human-like, then they're missing the point about creating content for people.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) November 8, 2022
