There’s plenty of discussion across the web right now about the use of AI in marketing and one area that’s talked about a lot is content creation. Google is still the main player in in both SEO and GEO forums and they’ve directly said they don’t care how content is created, only that it’s high-quality and valuable for human readers. Nevertheless, they’re adapting to the wave of AI-generated content that’s flooded the internet. We’ve seen a multitude of spam updates this year, Google have introduced aspects like contentEffort into their algorithm and several policy changes are all clearly targeting the problem of AI-generated content.
I think as users, we’re becoming more sensitive to “AI-isms” and have an instant, almost allergic reaction when it feels like a trusted source is producing low-quality, AI-heavy content. Google and other search engines are shifting towards rooting out content that, on the surface, is fine but doesn’t offer depth or substance and isn’t uniquely valuable – they are actively rewarding content that is based on real human experience and expertise.
How do we know this? Well, we wanted to test out how far we could go with a purely AI-driven content site to find out! Our team designed an experiment to test how well AI-written content ranks, when well-optimised and living on a fast website. We set up a high performance site, technically strong for SEO/GEO, put together an SEO strategy and programmatically created content using AI and optimised it.
Our timing for this experiment couldn’t have been better as you can see in the screenshot above. We launched the site at the beginning of September and after indexing, the site quickly achieved some strong rankings in its niche. At its peak, the site was receiving around 1.3K – 1.5K impressions per day. However, the gains were short lived. Google’s latest spam update ran from September 24th until 8th October and you’ll seen a sharp drop in impressions from 7th October – no manual action or technical problems, this is a clear algorithm penalty. Average positions drop from around 7-8 to around 30-40 over that cliff.
We have seen reports from other SEOs about short-term results from AI-generated content and that could be what we have seen rather than a direct demotion from the spam update. However, the timing of the drop is a really strong indicator that this site fell victim to the update.
What does this mean then? This experiment was quite extreme. All the content on this site was generated by AI with only minimal human direction. However, the research, strategy and optimisation were all solid and clearly produced strong early results. While other sites might not have such heavy AI usage, it still serves as a warning to what happens when content doesn’t meet Google’s requirements or is deemed low effort. Quality of content has always been a huge factor in SEO (and now GEO). AI has both raised and lowered the bar in the sense that people can produce relatively well-written content very easily, at scale, which used to be a barrier for many people. Those who want to stand out must put in more effort to produce uniquely valuable, experience and expertise rich content which satisfies Google’s EEAT criteria. If you don’t, the content will be ignored, or worse you’ll be penalised.
If you’re interested in learning more about this experiment or would like more advice on what to do with your content, please reach out to our team.