Why AI for blogging may not be a silver bullet

According to a recent blog post, Google's upcoming ranking updates in May will aim to exclude low-quality content from search results. This move comes as a response to the remarkable increase in AI-generated content tailored for SEO purposes to comply with Google's ranking criteria. This surge is attributed to the increased accessibility and user-friendliness of AI tools that can produce content aligned with Google's preferences. 

In addition to addressing AI-generated SEO content, Google's updates will also combat individuals who publish low-quality content on high-reputation websites. 

Elizabeth Tucker, Google's Product Management Director, has explained that these updates are intended to refine ranking systems to distinguish genuinely helpful webpages from those merely designed to cater to search engines. The objective is to minimize low-quality content in search results and direct more traffic to reputable and valuable websites. 

Google plans to leverage the insights from a 2022 algorithmic adjustment to reduce unhelpful and unoriginal content and apply them to the upcoming update, channeling more traffic towards helpful and high-quality sites.

“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.”