Ask an Expert: Does Google Index AI Content?

“Ask an Expert” is an occasional feature where we pose questions to seasoned ecommerce practitioners. For this installment, we’ve turned to Ann Smarty, the founder of Smarty Marketing, a search engine optimization firm, and a longtime Practical Ecommerce contributor.

She addresses Google’s policy on content produced by artificial intelligence tools.

Practical Ecommerce: Does Google index and rank AI-generated content?

Ann Smarty: Google published “guidance about AI-generated content” in its Search Central blog in February 2023. The guidelines are vague but worth reading nonetheless.

Ann Smarty

To summarize:

• • Google allows “helpful and original” AI-generated content. The post doesn’t offer examples of such content, but it presumably means using AI to repurpose, clarify, or shorten your original article.

• • Google does not allow the use of AI to mass-produce content intended solely to rank for multiple queries. This is against Google’s spam policies.

Google states in the post that it has dealt with automated content for years, such that the AI issue is not new. Google says it can detect content created with automation or AI, and its focus remains on E-E-A-T: expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.

Per Google, “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.”