Can AI-generated content penalize my SEO ?

It is normal that you are considering using a tool as powerful as Chat GPT to feed a blog, generate product sheets or scripts for your social networks. You can save time and resources, which is a temptation. But those of us who have been in the digital world for a long time know that things are almost never as pretty as they seem and that experiments are always better with a site other than our online store or our main means of generating income.

 

Today, we will try to shed a little more light on the whole issue of SEO and AI.

Let's start with this: Google understands its usefulness and has been incorporating AI into its algorithm for years. What happens is that it is transparent to the user, since it is done internally and without giving the user a chance to interact directly with the technology (unlike Chat GPT).

 

But the fact that it is not so obvious does not mean that AI is not being used in many of its updates. We have told you on this blog about concepts like MUM or BERT, but there is much more. For example, RankBrain, which is used to process search results using Artificial Intelligence, or Neural Matching, to establish relationships between words and concepts in searches.

One might think that if Google likes Artificial Intelligence, it will have no problem with the rest of us using it to create content (as long as it is of quality).

 

This is not the case. We are facing a new example of: "do as I say and not as I do", but this time at least they have made an official statement. And this is something we are grateful for when it comes to planning our strategy in line with the best practices set by the search engine.

 

Months ago, even before the explosion of Chat GPT, one of the most authoritative people in the Google network came to the fore with some unequivocal statements about its policy regarding content created with AI.

 

It was John Mueller himself who said -literally- that from Google all content generated automatically using Artificial Intelligence will be considered SPAM and, consequently, is susceptible to be penalized.

It is also true that he confessed the difficulty the algorithm has in identifying to what extent we are dealing with self-generated content or, on the contrary, content written by a person.

 

Initially, this task would fall to the webspam team, in other words, it would be people who would audit the sites and determine whether or not AI has been used in the writing of texts. That said, they are authorized and encouraged to manually penalize sites that do so.

 

In addition, in recent weeks, it is rumored that filters are being implemented so that this penalization occurs algorithmically and automatically. So the chances of getting "caught" are increasing exponentially.

At least that is what Google says, so you should take it very seriously. You are running the risk of being penalized, and that always has serious consequences on an online store .

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Let's not see this as an arbitrary decision. After all, Google knows that Chat GPT can be a threat to your business model. Maybe not now, but at the rate it is moving, the moment it delivers real-time results it will be a strong contender to take over the online search throne.

 

Of course, there are still uses that can be made of this tool that Google does not have to detect anything. It can be used as a source of inspiration or documentation, or as a way of structuring the content we create manually.

 

If you want to go a step further and take a gamble (I insist that we would not recommend it) you should avoid pasting the text as you extract it from the chat. At the very least, you should run it through a tool like AI detector to know to what extent it is detectable and, of course, a "rephrasing" tool like Quillbot's, which allows you to reorganize the content and make it look more organic.