Lie #3: Google Hates AI Content

This has been one of the BIGGEST misunderstandings in SEO history in regards to the use of AI for writing your content – yes, even I fell for it at one point.

The AI Scare

With the rise of ChatGPT going public in late 2022, Google begun pushing SpamBrain updates and Helpful Content Updates (HCU) targeting what it always targeted – spam. During these updates, many blog and page owners noticed drops in rankings and even penalties. Guaranteed, many of these websites that had a decline were heavily using AI for generating content – and it was working (until the updates rolled in).

SEOs analyzed this decline and correlated it with AI content, thinking, AI itself was the issue. This later sprung a sea of AI content humanizing tools trained to take AI generated slop and make it seem like a human wrote it.

This is where the community started going up in flames screeching to not use AI, or Google will penalize you for it. But the part we missed is Google was not against using AI, they were against abusing AI.

The reason many pages begun seeing penalties and low rankings was because these pages were putting out content in bulk. When I mean bulk, I’m talking hundreds to even thousands of pages per month. Is that even humanly possible? Even if you have an army of writers, that is still a difficult metric to meet every single month.

AI Slop

When you generate content with AI, have you ever actually read it? Usually AI written blogs have surface level discussions about the topic, nothing profound or original. And because of how AI works as discussed in lesson #6, at best it’s summarized information of existing content out there.