Your AI-Generated Content Can Rank if It’s Helpful

Does Google Love or Hate AI Content?

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Based on the Ahrefs study, Google doesn’t care if you use AI content or not on your website. This aligns with the fact that Google recently rolled out AI Mode and AI Overviews, changing the search landscape dramatically.

It would be quite hypocritical if the search engine harnessing the power of AI looked disapprovingly upon AI content.

Google’s wording on whether AI content is against its guidelines states:

“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.”

So, as long as you adhere to the rules and avoid manipulating Google’s algorithm to work in your favor, producing AI content isn’t a direct ranking factor. In fact, the research shows that there’s almost a negligible link between AI content and your position in the SERPs.

AI Appears in Top Pages

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86.5% of top pages in Google use AI for their content to some degree. This shows that there’s no negative impact for AI content when determining rankings. In fact, almost 5% of the top-performing pages analyzed by Ahrefs are completely written by AI tools.

That said, while AI content can appear in these top positions, almost 82% of high-ranking pages use a mix of AI and humans to write. Pages with less than 30% AI-written content are more likely to land the coveted position one spot, whereas

So, while Google doesn’t show favoritism towards content based on AI use alone, it really comes down to shining a spotlight on helpful, valuable, and relatable content above all else. And, content written by humans is more likely to achieve this, evident by the fact that Google started cracking down on fake EEAT content this year.

Content Needs a Human Touch

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Based on this data and the lack of correlation between AI content and ranking, should your business use AI to produce content now? The best-performing pages aren’t producing content with AI alone, meaning humans should always be involved in the creative process.

Here are a few things your business can do to use AI appropriately:

• Use AI as a tool for content creation, not as the only writer
• Add expertise and personal insights to elevate AI content
• Check AI-generated content for errors and inaccuracies (AI makes mistakes!)

Yes, AI can be a great time-saving tool when writing content for your site, but I recommend using it for first drafts only. It’s best you edit and enhance your content to ensure it’s truly helpful for your target audience – this will give your content the best chance to rank highly in the SERPs. It’s all about the searcher, not about how your content gets written.