Google Revises SEO Guidelines for AI-Generated Content

Alphabet Inc.’s Google LLC seems to be subtly changing its policy in recognizing the rise of artificial intelligence (AI).

In the latest revision, Google Search’s ‘Helpful Content Update’ now states that the company regularly monitors ‘content created for people’ instead of ‘content written by people.’

The updated phrase showed that Google sees AI’s significant reliance on content creation, with the US search giant aiming to provide focus on human- as well as AI-generated content that would help users.

Google’s Approach to AI-Generated Content

Google is making several investments in developing its own AI-powered products, including an AI tool that can produce news stories and present them to major newspapers, its large language model (LLM) Bard, and new search features currently under trial.

Therefore, making changes to its guidelines aligns with the company’s planned course.

Still, Google intends to repay original, useful, and human-made content that brings value to users.

Google Search advocate John Mueller said that by definition, if a user is using AI to create content, it would be revised from other websites, suggesting content that is repetitive or poorly made by AI could weigh on search engine optimization (SEO) despite technological developments.

The outlook reinforces the need for human writers and editors in content creation, and factoring out human contribution carries risk. Errors made by AI models can sometimes be amusing or hurtful, but some of their mistakes can be costly and life-threatening.

Google appears to be taking the necessary actions on users using AI for content summarization or rephrasing. The search giant has also employed its own method of identifying AI-manufactured content.

According to Google, it uses a fully automated classifier process through machine-learning model. It utilizes AI to detect and separate properly made content from poorly made ones.

Instead of reproducing AI-written data, the company is attempting to identify the data and reward human-generated content accordingly.