Google to Crush AI Content Websites?

Will google crush AI! Google is AI. From its bots that scan content, to deciding what websites hit the number one spot on a page, to what adverts they show you… It’s all algorithm based, it’s all AI. There are no humans reading content, choosing websites or planting customer specific ads in front of you — It’s all AI!

If Google actually believed AI was the devil, why would they invest millions upon millions of dollars in creating ‘Bard’ their very own AI content generator. So let’s see if we can pick the bones out of Google’s announcements, and see if we can drill down fully to understand what is going on here.

Let’s go back to the beginning, how does Google prioritise content. Google’s algorithm seeks to rank articles that are beneficial and improve a user’s search experience. Google will highlight material based on its quality regardless of whether it was produced by a person or an AI writer. Google recommends the E-E-A-T formula (expertise, experience, authoritativeness and trustworthiness) for consumers and content developers.

In a nutshell, it wants its customers to find the best, the most helpful, the most informative content on the websites it presents to us, and not some spammy junk written just to get rankings. In fact, bad content written purely for ranking purposes to manipulate search results is a violation of Google’s spam policies, regardless of who or what writes it.

Many years ago, Google realised that there was a Tsunami of content being uploaded solely to rank and make money from those rankings. Google couldn’t actually stop content being uploaded as their whole system would wither and die, so instead it produced a Quality over Quantity threshold. Its algorithms were tweaked and tuned to detect low quality, poorly written content which it would detect and demote to beyond oblivion.

Unless you live under a rock, you know that Google is continuously crawling content looking for spam, but Google has been very clever by neither declaring it can, or can not, detect AI contect. In a recent announcement Google said… “More content by people, for people, in search” But many believe this is just smoke and mirrors. It’s acting like a sheepdog hoping it can round us up and point us in one direction. It’s a rather weak attempt to try and suppress AI, but that’s all it is. Google knows that AI is so powerful because it’s based on machine learning; It can compare good with bad and improve itself using the good as a foundation to develop better than before content. It is impossible for it to be identified right now or in the future. I expect the next generation of AI writers will be able to take your text and reproduce it in the voice of your favorite author… Ernest Hemmingway, Churchill, Shakespeare. If you think that’s too far fetched just look at AI imaging. I can ask an AI tool such as Midjourney to create a painting of a Ford Mustang in the style of Van Gogh and as sure as eggs is eggs, within 60 seconds my Vangoghian Ford Mustang is there before my eyes.

So, if we accept that AI is in itself not going to be blasted off the face of Google, can we throw-up any old AI written boring drivel… Well no, of course not. Remember the basic rules of content still apply — expertise, experience, authoritativeness and trustworthiness.

I believe AI is staggeringly wonderful and brilliant, but it’s also dangerous, as it collates and constructs information for a collection of already existing data on the internet. But is that data correct, are the opinions it reflects and rewrites accurate? It’s been proven many times to get things wrong, financial information, medical recommendations, dates and statistics, so you must check and double check to ensure what it spills out is accurate. If you put up AI content that is wrong it’s going to fail the Google expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness test.

Google doesn’t want regurgitated content, it wants articles to have original thoughts and perspectives. If you use AI as a tool to create content I would recommend that you, yourself, rewrite it. Give it your human touch and the Google algorithm will reward it. You’ll get a fair shake from Google if you help them deliver the best relevant content for their users.

I’m sure that some of you may be thinking, did I get AI to write this?… Well I can assure you that these words are 100% mine, and, unless I’m a Bot and I don’t actually know it, I am in fact a human called...

Chris Jones.