Google’s Webmaster Guidelines are designed to help webmasters create a website that can provide a better user experience for their visitors. To this end, Google does not allow websites to contain content created automatically through bots, scrapers, or other automated means. This is to ensure that the content on the website is meaningful, relevant, and of high quality. Additionally, automated content can be used for malicious purposes, and Google does not want to be associated with such activities. Furthermore, content created through automated means is often not optimized for search engine algorithms, which can lead to a lower ranking for the website. Therefore, it is essential that webmasters adhere to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines to ensure their website is successful.
What others are saying
First, let’s look at Google’s Search Advocate, John Mueller in this video, who talks about Automatically generated content.
in reply to the query regarding how Google perceives the utilization of these techniques.
In response to an inquiry about GPT-3 AI writing tools, John Mueller, Google’s Search Advocate, has stated that content produced by such tools violates the search engine’s webmaster regulations. This has been a point of contention in the SEO community.
Whether or not Google will tolerate the utilization of such tools. Mueller stated that this type of material falls under the heading of auto-generated content and may lead to a manual penalty.
At present, Google’s systems are not equipped to identify AI-created content without the aid of human review. Although there are practical uses for AI writing tools, and various trustworthy organizations are utilizing them without issue, Mueller’s comments must be considered.
Google’s Webmaster Guidelines dictate that websites should not contain any content created through automated means.
No matter what technology is employed to generate it, content created by machines is categorically deemed as automatically generated. Google has been consistent with auto-generated content from the beginning, as Mueller made sure to stress.
He believes that, although the quality might be better than the primitive tools used in the past, using machine learning for content production is still classed as automatically generated content and therefore does not abide by the Webmaster Guidelines, which is why it would be seen as spam.
Is it possible for Google to recognize content that Artificial Intelligence has created?
An inquiry was made regarding Google’s capability of recognizing content created by machine learning applications. Can Google distinguish between articles written by humans and those composed by machines?
Mueller did not make any assertions that Google can spot AI-generated material automatically. Although, if the webspam team of Google comes across it, they have the approval to take action on it. He stated,
“I can’t guarantee that. But for us, if we observe that something is mechanically generated, then the webspam team can definitely take action on that. I am uncertain how the future may develop in this aspect, but I think it will be similar to any other advanced technologies, where sometimes people will do something and they get away with it, and then the webspam team will catch up and deal with that issue overall. As of now, we still consider it as an automatically generated content. It may be possible that in the future, this technology can be utilized as an aide for people. For instance, you could use machine translation as the foundation for formulating a translated version of a website, but you would still need to manually go through it. Maybe over time, these AI tools will evolve such that you can use them to become more efficient in writing or to make sure that you are writing in a suitable manner, similar to the spelling and grammar checking tools, which are also based on machine learning. However, I am not certain what the future holds in this regard.”
Mueller made it clear that Google does not contemplate how the AI writing tools are being utilized. He further added that using them in any way is deemed as spam. He said,
“Currently, it is all in contravention of the webmaster guidelines. So from our perspective, if we were to come across something like that, the webspam team would see it as spam.”
To hear his full reply, watch the video below.
What Impact Will This Have On Your Website?
Miranda Miller, the Senior Managing Editor here at Search Engine Journal, said that the most essential part of this Q&A is that Google’s algorithms cannot recognize content generated by language models like GPT-3.
She added that if Google finds out about automated content, then the webspam team may take action, but we are not talking about the article spinners of 2003. Additionally,
Miller highlighted that media and universities are already using artificial intelligence. Other research organizations are finding trends, summarizing articles, fact-checking, analyzing data, and writing entire articles, with the Associated Press utilizing AI for story generation in 2014.
She ended her remarks by pointing out that it would be odd for Google to prohibit webmasters and content creators from using AI to improve user experience since they use it so prevalently themselves.
