Google’s John Mueller has confirmed that automatically-generated content produced by AI writing tools is considered spam and against the search giant’s guidelines. Speaking in the latest SEO Office Hours session, Mueller addressed the topic when asked by one of the attendees whether the use of GPT-3 AI writing tools, which are becoming increasingly popular.
In short, Mueller confirmed that the content produced by such tools is considered spam and could result in a manual penalty – the strongest action the search giant typically takes against websites breaking its spam guidelines.
AI-generated content is against Google guidelines
While it shouldn’t come as a surprise to SEOs that AI-generated content is considered spam by Google, it’s a legitimate question considering the rise and increased use of such tools. We’ve seen dozens of GPT-3 AI writing tools emerge over the past few years and gain plenty of traction as a productivity tool for content production.
Companies can sign up to platforms and use such tools to create landing page copy, blog posts and a range of other content types. Generally, all you have to do is type in your keywords, add or edit an automatically-generated title and select a few more settings to automatically generate hundreds of words of content.
Honestly, the quality of the content produced by GPT-3 AI writing tools is still very poor so it’s difficult to argue that it’s nothing more than spam. Yes, you can fill a page with words somewhat relevant to keywords almost instantly but the content doesn’t have any purpose, direction or end result for the reader. You’re simply filling pages with words that are somewhat related to the selected keywords – and that’s 100% spam.
Don’t take our word for it, though – let’s see what John Mueller had to say about the topic:
“For us, these would, essentially, still fall into the category of automatically generated content which is something we’ve had in the Webmaster Guidelines since almost the beginning.
And people have been automatically generating content in lots of different ways. And for us, if you’re using machine learning tools to generate your content, it’s essentially the same as if you’re just shuffling words around, or looking up synonyms, or doing the translation tricks that people used to do. Those kind of things.
My suspicion is maybe the quality of content is a little bit better than the really old school tools, but for us it’s still automatically generated content, and that means for us it’s still against the Webmaster Guidelines. So we would consider that to be spam.”
Mueller acknowledges that the content produced by the latest GPT-3 AI writing tools is probably better than the old school tools referred to in Google’s Webmaster Guidelines – and this is true. However, he also suggests that, in practice, it’s no different to the old tactics people used to craft spam content for target keywords – and he’s right here, too.
AI writing tools will continue to improve with time and, who knows, one day they might be able to produce quality content, but we’re not there yet. Not even close.
What do Google’s Webmaster Guidelines say?
You can read through Google’s Webmaster Guidelines by visiting this documentation page on the Search Central website. You can also watch a quick summary in the video below:
Within these guidelines, Google includes its quality guidelines and a specific list of things you should avoid doing with content production:
- Automatically generated content intended to manipulate search rankings
- Participating in link schemes
- Creating pages with little or no original content
- Cloaking
- Sneaky redirects
- Hidden text or links
- Doorway pages
- Scraped content
- Participating in affiliate programs without adding sufficient value
- Loading pages with irrelevant keywords
- Creating pages with malicious behaviour, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware
- Abusing structured data markup
- Sending automated queries to Google
As you can see, automatically-generated content tops the list of things to avoid in Google’s quality guidelines and here’s how the search giant defines auto-generated content:
“Automatically generated (also called “auto-generated”—content) is content that’s been generated programmatically. In cases where it’s intended to manipulate search rankings and not help users, Google may take actions on such content.”
By definition, AI-generated content is generated programmatically – the only difference from older technology is that it uses machine learning to produce auto-generated content.
The guidelines also offer some examples of what may constitute auto-generated content that Google could take action against:
- Text that makes no sense to the reader but which may contain search keywords.
- Text translated by an automated tool without human review or curation before publishing.
- Text generated through automated processes, such as Markov chains.
- Text generated using automated synonymising or obfuscation techniques.
- Text generated from scraping Atom/RSS feeds or search results.
- Stitching or combining content from different web pages without adding sufficient value.
We’ve tested many of the major GPT-3 AI writing tools and the quality they produce is all very similar (it’s the same technology, after all). In many cases, the content barely makes any sense at all and, even when it does, it’s so broad and generic that it offers no value to any reader.
You certainly couldn’t use this content to persuade a blog reader or landing page visitors to take any kind of action or teach them anything of value.
How can Google detect auto-generated content?
John Mueller is quite certain that AI-generated content violates Google guidelines and our own analysis of the guidelines comes to the same conclusion. There’s no doubt in our minds that the content produced by GPT-3 AI writing tools is spam but can Google really distinguish this type of content from high-quality pages?
John Mueller also addressed this question specifically in the same SEO Office Hours session and, as you might expect, Google isn’t going to automatically detect content produced by GPT-3 AI writing tools.
Here’s Mueller’s answer in full:
“I can’t claim that. But for us, if we see that something is automatically generated, then the webspam team can definitely take action on that.
And I don’t know how the future will evolve there, but I imagine like with any other of these technologies, there will be a little bit of a cat and mouse game, where sometimes people will do something and they get away with it, and then the webspam team catches up and solves that issue on a broader scale.
From our recommendation we still see it as automatically generated content. I think over time maybe this is something that will evolve in that it will become more of a tool for people. Kind of like you would use machine translation as a basis for creating a translated version of a website, but you still work through it manually.
And maybe over time these AI tools will evolve in that direction that you use them to be more efficient in your writing or to make sure that you’re writing in a proper way like the spelling and the grammar checking tools, which are also based on machine learning. But I don’t know what the future brings there.”
The big caveat here is that, if Google’s webspam team catches you using content that appears to be automatically generated – using GPT-3 AI writing tools or any other technology – it’s authorised to take action by applying a manual action penalty.
Mueller acknowledges that this won’t stop everyone from using such tools or trying whatever they can to get one over on Google’s algorithm.
he also touches on the bigger question here in terms of whether website owners and publishers should use AI tools to produce content or not.
Should you use AI tools to automatically generate content?
Google is 100% clear that automatically-generated content violates its guidelines but this refers to copy and pasting AI-generated content without making any changes to it. What if you use these tools to quickly produce a first draft and edit it to improve the quality of the overall piece? Or, what if you use it to quickly produce certain parts of content – such as the introduction or definitions of key terms – and edit them to guarantee quality?
The idea that AI writing tools will replace professional content creators is misguided because the more likely scenario is that they’ll be able to help these professionals produce content faster, thus reducing the time and financial cost of content production.
This is why we continue to test GPT-3 AI writing tools and similar technologies because, one day, they might become essential tools for content production.
As things stand, the tools aren’t good enough to speed up content production, as far as we’re concerned. By the time you manually select the type of content you want to produce, define your topics/keywords and select the other required settings, you could manually write a better intro than any of these tools will come up with.
In most cases, you have to hit the generate button several times before you get anything that makes enough sense to even work with. And, then, you have to edit the content so much that you’re not saving any time by using these tools. In fact, the occasions where these tools have saved us time is when they come up with ideas or angles that we hadn’t thought of – but you can get this from any decent keyword tool or the “People also ask” section in Google Search.
In terms of actual writing time, GPT-3 AI writing tools don’t currently save us enough time to make any meaningful difference.
This may change as the technology evolves further but this won’t be happening any time soon.
Have you tried any of the latest AI writing tools?
If you’ve tried any 0f the latest AI writing tools and ha better luck than us, we’d be interested to hear your experiences on Twitter – you can find us at @hot_click. Alternatively, if you’re struggling to produce quality content for your marketing strategies, our content team can always help. Call us on 0161 870 2580 or fill out the form on our contact page to discuss your next move.
Also, if you want to watch the SEO Office Hours session discussed in this article, you can view the session in full below. The discussion about AI writing tools starts at 21:36 and the embedded video below is bookmarked to start at this point.