Koala AI

SEOs: Stop Using AI Detectors! (Focus on This Instead)

In a recent Google blog post, they made it very clear that they do not specifically penalize AI-generated content. Instead, they believe in "rewarding high-quality content, however it is produced".

This is a clear indication that you are wasting your time (and money!) if you are using AI detectors. This is because you are focusing on the wrong thing. Instead of thinking in terms of content being AI generated or not you need to be thinking in terms of whether your content is helpful or not.

Of course, as the owner of KoalaWriter, I am a bit biased. But I only created an AI writing tool after it was clear that Google does not specifically penalize AI-generated content.

Key Points from Google's Recent Blog Post

Below I have highlighted some key points from Google's recent blog post. I think it is crucial for your success as an SEO to actually read and understand Google's guidance.

  • "Our focus on the quality of content, rather than how content is produced, is a useful guide that has helped us deliver reliable, high quality results to users for years."
  • "AI has the ability to power new levels of expression and creativity, and to serve as a critical tool to help people create great content for the web."
  • "Poor quality content isn't a new challenge for Google Search to deal with. We've been tackling poor quality content created both by humans and automation for years."

Source: Google Search's guidance about AI-generated content (February 8, 2023)

Resources on Helpful Content and EEAT

I would recommend reading Google's guide on Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content first.

Next, read Google's Spam policies for Google web search to make sure you are not in violation. Violating any of these spam guidelines will make you much more likely to be penalized in a future Google update or even have your site deindexed at any time.

After you are familiar with the spam policies, take a read through the comprehensive Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines to understand EEAT. This is a 173 page PDF directly from Google that is used to train contractors who rate pages. These ratings in turn help train the algorithm that decides where to rank pages in the index. Personally, I find this guide incredibly helpful because it even shows specific examples of pages that are considered "lowest quality" all the way up to "highest quality" so you can get an idea of exactly what they are looking for.

What's Next

In the future, I will be putting together my own guides and checklists for Helpful Content and EEAT. Additionally, I will be creating specific guidance on how to responsibly create AI content and how to edit AI content to conform to Google's best-practices.

If you want to stay up-to-date then please register for a free account.