Over the past few weeks, there has been a great deal of conversation in the digital marketing industry regarding automated intelligence and the effect that content created by programs like ChatGPT will have on the digital marketing industry. For example, Microsoft rolled out a version of Bing integrated with Bing Search just last week. Many marketers began to speculate about how Google would treat AI generated content when added to websites. Some marketers believed Google would penalize AI generated content as a whole, while others believed this would like be too drastic of an action.
Fortunately for marketers, Google did not take long to provide updated guidance for their search engine based on the expected increase of artificial intelligence generated content.
What does Google’s AI guidance mean for marketers?
Google’s guidance to webmasters regarding AI generated content should not come as a surprise to marketers. Google’s guidance regarding content has always been to create unique, engaging and valuable content. The fact that artificial intelligence content will be allowed by Google as long as there are checks and balances which ensure quality content should be no surprise to marketers.
Anyone who has successfully managed a search engine optimization strategy for a business understands the need for valuable and unique content for their website. Providing this type of content should continue to be the end goal for any optimization campaign. Whether this is achieved by utilizing content 100% written by a human, or content which is created with the help of AI technology, does not matter. There are advantages to utilizing AI technology to assist in creating content for your website. By reducing the amount of time needed by a human to do simpler tasks like writing content, marketers can spend more time completing more advanced actions on the website like conversion rate optimization.
However, marketers should be wary about how they implement artificial intelligence within their greater content strategy. While Google’s guidance does not specifically penalize AI generated content, there are stipulations within the guidance which would result in penalization. Google’s guidance says that, “Appropriate use of AI or automation is not against our guidelines. This means that it is not used to generate content primarily to manipulate search rankings, which is against our spam policies”. At the end of the day this means Google will continue to penalize content which is used to manipulate search rankings and do not provide users with value. Marketers and business owners alike should continue to create unique content and valuable content, with the help of AI should they choose, which will ultimately continue to generate great visibility in search results as it has in the past.