Google Just Changed Its AI Content Guidelines (Unreviewed AI Is Now a Liability)

0:00Edward: It's important to know if you are using unreviewed AI text on your site, especially a lot of it, you are playing with fire Nobody knows this. Google has a guide for using AI writing on websites I'm gonna share this guide. There's a new addition to it as of October 1st. Just a few days ago, they added a, a very important new addition to it. Then I'm gonna share what this means for you. So the guide is Google's Search Guidance on Using Generative AI Content on Your Website.

0:30It's in Google Search Central documentation. It's very short It says Generative AI can be particularly useful when researching a topic and to add structure to original content. however, using generative AI tools or other similar tools to generate many pages without adding value for users may violate Google's spam policy on scaled content abuse. No surprises there. We've talked about that many times on the show. If you're using generative AI content on your website, make sure your work meets the standards of the search essentials and our spam policies These guidelines are not a guide to ranking first in Google.

1:04They're used by our search raters to help evaluate the performance of our various search ranking systems and their ratings don't directly influence ranking But don't get it twisted. The work of quality raters is very important to Google search. In fact, in the past, this was last year, Google's quality raters were instructed to give the lowest rating possible to AI-generated content or any auto-generated content if it shows little to no effort, little to no originality, and little to no added value for website visitors.

1:38There was a big slide about it, and it was going viral in the SEO community last year And if you don't know, Google searches quality raters, they're just independent contractors. They manually evaluate webpages, manually evaluate search results to help Google test and then improve its algorithms Their feedback is one of many signals that Google uses to improve its search results So this guide on using AI content continues. This next part is where the October 1st change was made.

2:07. When creating content for the web, focus on accuracy, quality, and relevance, especially when automatically generating the content." Here we go. This is what was added. " Keep in mind that generative models don't retrieve facts but predict a likely sequence of words based on their training data. Because of this, generative AI outputs may contain inaccuracies, also known as hallucinations." Here it comes. " It is critical to manually fact-check and review all AI-generated content for accuracy and trustworthiness before publishing.

2:40This review also applies to metadata like the page title, meta description, structured data, and even alt text for images which can appear in search results." This gives Google another reason to take out websites that are doing scaled AI content. Because if you are scaling AI content, 99.999% of the time you are not reviewing it. You're just scaling it without even reviewing it. This gives Google another reason to take out websites that are doing this.

3:10Because maybe a website is doing this, but they're not using it to try to game search results. But this still gives Google another reason to say, "Yeah, we're not including your content or your website in our index because of these reasons." And again, this is in Google's documentation called Google Search's Guidance on Using Generative AI Content on Your Website There's one last section to this piece of documentation. It says, " Give users context.

3:35Sharing information about how a piece of content was created can help give your readers more context. If you're automatically generating content, consider adding information on how your content was created in a way that makes sense for your audience, such as by providing more background information on how automation was used and adding image metadata." For e-commerce sites, Google Merchant Center has policies for AI-generated content. In particular, AI-generated images must contain metadata using the IPTC Digital Source Type trained algorithmic media metadata.

4:09AI-generated product data such as title and description attributes must be specified separately and labeled as AI-generated. For more, see our FAQs in our blog post on the AI-generated content. And so I picked out, I cherry-picked The most important sections From Google's FAQ about their guidance on using AI-generated content. It's a different page, it's an FAQ, and I picked out the most important parts of this long FAQ There's these two paragraphs in the FAQ that says, " Google has many years of experience dealing with automation being used in an attempt to game search results.

4:46Our spam fighting efforts, including our spam brain system will continue however spam is produced. Oh, this paragraph is important. " This said, it's important to recognize that not all use of automation, including AI generation, is spam. automation has long been used to generate helpful content such as sports scores, weather forecasts, and transcripts." Then Google has a section, " Why doesn't Google Search ban AI content?" It's just important to note that they are explicitly saying that they don't ban AI content.

5:15They have a section saying that they don't ban AI content. Then there's a section, " How will Google Search prevent poor quality AI content from taking over search results?" Google says, " 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. We have existing systems to determine helpfulness of content. other systems work to elevate original news reporting.

5:42Our systems continue to be regularly improved." AI text, here's a reality. AI text is very hard to detect if it's just a couple of words or a paragraph. At length, it is a lot easier. Multiple pages on a website are likely analyzed together. Multiple websites could be analyzed together But just short amounts of AI text are actually very hard for algorithms to detect as AI writing. I talk about this more on episode 1083 of the podcast, Google's New AI Spam Detector Could Wipe Out Entire SEO Networks Google has a section in this FAQ: Will AI content rank highly on Search?

6:20Google says using AI doesn't give content any special gains. It's just content. If it is useful, helpful, original, and satisfies aspects of EEAT EEAT is an acronym. It stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness So Google says if it satisfies aspects of EEAT, it might do well in search. If it doesn't, it might not. EEAT is not a ranking signal It's just Google's guidance on how to make content that better satisfies search intent Google has a section in this FAQ, should I add author bylines to all my content?

6:55Google says you should consider having accurate author bylines when readers would reasonably expect it, such as to any content where someone might think, "Who wrote this?" As a reminder, publishers that appear in Google News should use bylines and author information Then Google gives this question, " Can I list AI as the author of content?" And Google recommends giving AI as an author byline is probably not the best way to follow our recommendation to make clear to readers when AI is part of the content creation process.

7:25The last question that I'm gonna share from this FAQ is, should I add AI or automation disclosures to my content? Google recommends AI or automation disclosures are useful for content where someone might think, " How was this created?" Consider adding these when it would be reasonably expected. So my take on using AI-generated text and AI-generated content in your SEO has not changed. My recommendations are this: AI content ranks very well, but make sure you wield it properly.

7:54I recommend using AI as a writing assistant. You're way less likely to satisfy search intent and way more likely to throw off bad user signals with unchecked AI content, especially above the fold, the top portion of the page that the lands on Also, when you have AI just write an entire page and then you proofread it, that's not great either because you are getting anchored in the AI's way of thinking if an LLM is making an SEO page from start to finish in one go it's going to predict search intent wrong in many places, oftentimes including above the fold.

8:30So that's why I recommend working closely with AI as a writing assistant, but not having it make an entire SEO page in one shot, and especially avoiding scaled content abuse with AI. Don't get me wrong, if you do scaled content with AI or you're just putting out unchecked AI pages that you one-shotted, you will get away with this for a couple of months. Then, depending on how aggressively you're putting out content, you will either see a sharp decline or you'll just see a gradual decline over time And as I have shared on a recent episode Google can literally lose faith in a website.

9:06John Mueller, Google's search advocate, said this responding to somebody who wanted to do programmatic SEO, which can be very similar to scaled AI content. And John Mueller literally said Our systems have possibly lost faith in your site providing good value to users based on the old pages that dissatisfied searchers coming to your site if you're in that position I talk about recoveries on that episode of the podcast, episode 1,166, " Google Can Lose Faith in Your Website.

9:37Here's How to Get It Back." A few more recommendations before I go. I have a guide on how to humanize AI content It'll be in the description for this episode A lot of people know the basics, you know, don't put in em dashes But one of the things that nobody talks about anymore that used to be just an SEO best practice is using images and video. And when you are one-shotting SEO pages I rarely see these SEO pages that are one-shotted with AI using images and video.

10:06Images and video is a great way to humanize AI content. A lot of people will just glance over the text and instead look at the images. So you want to have accurate images But it really is a great way to better satisfy search intent And distract people from the fact that if you are using obvious AI text, that you're using obvious AI text. And then for conversions It's important to keep in mind that AI creates really wordy pages if you are not guiding the AI really intensely, and oftentimes you still have to trim and edit.

10:38LLMs will put in lots of fluff. They will distract searchers and users from your main call to actions. I have an article about this, how to double your conversions by doing less, 10 before and after examples. This will also be in the description for this episode. But time and time again, you see people removing text, shortening text, even removing the n- the, the top navigation and doubling, quadrupling, or even in one case, increasing conversions by 15 times by decluttering a page.

11:08And AI is very good at making cluttered pages so if you want to improve your conversions, I think everybody wants to improve their conversions, especially by doing less, please check out that article. You, you will love it. The last thing is AI content that is detected could be excluded, though it's gonna rank well But it could be excluded from AI training data because it worsens models. And I share that on episode one thousand one hundred fifty-three Google Can Detect Your AI Content.

11:37Here's What Happens Next. That episode is one of my highest performing recent episodes and shares how Google can detect AI content And the consequences both for rankings and for your content being used in training data Now, if you want to save years learning how to do search engine optimization that gets sales, that gets paying customers, that gets users, .\ That gets warm leads in heat who are desperate for a solution, calling you on the phone, desperate, "Oh my God, I can't believe you made this page for exactly what I wanted.

12:11I'm so grateful." If you wanna know how to find these searchers, how to find the things that they are searching, their keywords, how to target their keywords with conversion-based SEO landing pages, SEO landing pages that are meant to convert, not outdated, super long, tedious blog posts, how to structure your site for these pages, how to build backlinks, examples in every niche, step-by-step guides, how to do an SEO technical audit, how to do a content audit Google Docs, Google Sheets, images, templates, everything.

12:41If you want to learn my system for doing SEO that gets sales, I have a 13-and-a-half hour course on this at compactkeywords.com. So many people are loving this course, and you will be one of them And that, ladies and gentlemen, is everything that I got for you on this episode of the show. This is episode 1,187 of The Edward Show. This is my daily search engine optimization podcast. I have done this show for 1,187 days in a row without missing a single day because I'm a crazy person.

13:16And if you watched this on YouTube, thank you so much for watching. If you listened on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, thank you so much for listening, and I will talk to you again tomorrow. Bye now