Does Google Care If An AI Wrote Your Website Content?

There seems to be a debate among local business owners. Some say human-written website content is a must in order to rank.

Part of the debate is whether Google can recognize AI content and whether it cares. The other question is if your rankings will suffer.

Google Seems More Interested In What Was Written Rather Than How It Was Written

Google’s published guidance puts the emphasis on helpful, reliable content created for people. Google’s spam policies focus more on whether content provides value than whether AI was involved in creating it.

Let’s take a look at an example of two local roofing companies. They published articles responding to a question that a customer had posted.

The first company uses a human writer who doesn’t know anything about roofing. All this writer does is research other roofing websites, takes what they have written, and then rewrites it into a 1,000-word article.

The second roofer decides to use AI. He gives the AI information from his 20 years of repairing roofs. He adds knowledge about problems he’s encountered and how he has repaired roofs and fixed the problem the customer had. He provides local weather conditions and local areas where he’s worked. When AI is finished putting together the article, he reads the finished article and corrects anything that’s wrong.

Which one would you prefer?

Being Human Doesn’t Automatically Make Content Helpful

Even before AI came on the scene, there was plenty of bad website content.

For example, website visitors might see identical pages for every town within a 50 mile radius. This is because business owners were adding generic articles mainly to get another page on Google.

Google’s current guidelines want business owners’ websites to provide original information regarding their knowledge about their business. Google’s guidance emphasizes creating helpful, reliable content for people (like on this website) rather than content created primarily to manipulate search rankings.

That’s much more important than who wrote the article.

There Is A Problem With AI Content

Here’s the catch.

Before AI, writing and posting dozens of articles took time. Time we didn’t really care about, because that’s how it was done.

Now, with AI’s speed, it can generate an amazing number of articles. 10’s of thousands and even hundreds of thousands of articles. But massive numbers of pages is not what Google is looking for. Google specifically warns against generating large numbers of pages primarily to manipulate rankings without adding value for users. Articles have valuable, useful information, otherwise Google might deindex 100,000 pages just as fast as they were created.

Google Spam Policies

Stop Worrying About AI. Focus on the Content.

Whether Google can tell AI was involved isn’t really the question. You’re having articles created by AI (and then heavily edited) for your business website. This is because you want customers to find the articles and find them useful enough to want to call you or buy from you. That’s where your focus should be.

What do your articles need (whether AI written or human written):

* You want your articles to answer real questions.

* You want them to be accurate.

* You want it to include firsthand knowledge.

* You want to offer information not found on competing websites.

Whether it’s AI or human-written, neither method guarantees good content. Your main focus is whether your content proves it’s worth reading.

And as a followup thought: The article was written by ChatGPT. It then went through 2 human editors and then the article was read out loud to finish. As you can see I’ve added even more additional information including a video. I’m editing so my visitors will like what they’ve read.

Reddit – r/content_marketing – AffectionateTry9750

Does Google actually prefer human-written content over AI content?

Hey everyone,

I’ve been digging into SEO lately and had a question I’d love some real-world insights on.

Is 100% human-written content actually required to rank well in SEO today? Or is it more about content quality, regardless of whether it’s written by a human, AI, or a mix of both?

I’m seeing mixed opinions:

Some say Google prefers purely human-written content

Others say AI-assisted content works fine if it’s valuable and well-edited

For those who’ve tested this:

Have you seen ranking differences between human vs AI (or hybrid) content?

Does Google actually detect or penalize AI content in practice?

What’s working best for you right now?

Would really appreciate hearing from people who’ve experimented with this.

Thanks!

Additional Information

*  Reports Indicate Google’s Spam Update Focused On SEO AI Content
Reports indicate that Google’s recent spam update focused on catching mass-generated SEO AI content. Roger Montti SEJ STAFF

*  Reddit stock sinks on report it may not renew Google AI content deal