Google’s March 2024 core algorithm update is penalizing sites made with AI-generated content, and it’s a fact that AI-generated content cannot meet the quality standards outlined in Google’s various documentation. But there’s still a way to use AI in a way that results in high-quality content.
Why AI Can’t Meet Google’s Quality Thresholds
Several rating systems, including the Reviews and Helpful Content systems, have explicit quality standards that make AI-generated content impossible to meet.
Adding an extra E to EAT (for experience) should have been a signal to content creators that there were risks involved in using AI.
Examples of SERP features, quality signals, and ranking signals that inherently exclude AI content
The writing on the wall about AI content has always been plain to see.
Here are some of the qualities Google’s documentation says are important that rule out purely AI-generated content:
Experience Posted reviews must be practical. Google News emphasizes human authors in the Google News SERPs. Google Insights, announced in May 2023, emphasizes human authors (hidden gems) found in forums. (expertise questions)
Quality concepts
Google published Self-assessment questions to help publishers identify whether their content meets Google’s quality standards.
These questions do not list specific ranking factors. They only list concepts of things that generally reflect what high-quality websites tend to display.
If AI-generated content doesn’t fit these concepts, the content likely doesn’t meet quality standards, regardless of whether publishers try to fake the outward signs of quality, such as author pages, etc.
Authorship and experience
The Expertise section of the self-assessment documentation mentions authors in a way that cannot be replicated with machine-generated content.
This section states:
“Content presents information in a way that makes you want to trust it, such as a clear source, evidence of expertise involved, background on the author or the site that publishes it, such as through links to a page of ‘author or on a site page? about page?’
The section cited above focuses the experience on the following three factors:
Province (source citations, fact-checking, citation attribution) Evidence of experience involved Author background
These three qualities are the external signs usually associated with experience that AI cannot achieve.
Content quality: originality
The content and quality section of the self-assessment guide requires originality.
Here’s what this section of the Google documentation asks:
“Does the content provide original information, reporting, research or analysis?
… Does the content provide insightful analysis or interesting information that goes beyond the obvious?
Little originality is the hallmark of generative AI. Content created by generative AI is literally the most likely string of words on a given topic.
First hand experience
The people section first of the self-assessment questions asks about first-hand experience:
“Does your content clearly demonstrate first-hand experience and deep knowledge (for example, the experience that comes from using a product or service or visiting a site)?”
Clearly, a machine has no first-hand knowledge. You cannot manage a product or use a service.
AI can still be used for content creation
Given how many sites with AI-generated content are receiving manual actions during the March 2024 core algorithm update, it may be time to reconsider the AI site for web content.
There’s still a way to use AI that can result in high-quality, people-centric content. What matters most about content is the vision behind the content, not who or what wrote it.
One way forward may be to use a combination of human knowledge and experience as data that AI can use to generate content.
How to create review content with AI
For example, you can scale product reviews by creating a checklist of the data points consumers need to make a purchase decision. Someone still has to manage the product and review it, but just write ratings and comments for each data point in the review checklist.
If the review is for a children’s bike, reference the things users want to know about the bike, such as what age and size the bike fits, how much it weighs, how strong are the training wheels , etc. If it’s a TV review, the checklist will have benchmarks related to the richness of black levels, off-center viewing, ease of setting colors, etc.
At the end of the checklist, have a section called Final Impressions that lists the pros and cons, as well as the overall sentiment in which the reviewer writes whether they feel positive, neutral, or negative about the product and who they think the product is for. product is better a budget, those who crave performance, etc. Once that’s done, upload the document to your AI and ask it to write the review.
How to write any type of content with AI
An acquaintance shared a tip with me about using AI to polish dirty content. His workflow consists of dictating everything that needs to be said in a recording, regardless of paragraph structure, simply pouring it into the recording. He then uploads it to ChatGPT and asks ChatGPT to turn it into a professional document. You can even ask him to generate pros and cons and an executive summary.
AI amplifies human input
My suggestion is to think of the AI as a ghost writer that takes a rough document and turns it into a polished essay or article. This approach can work for almost any scenario, including scaled product descriptions.
The important qualities of content are those that a human provides that an AI is incapable of, things like sourcing, evidence of expertise, sourcing, and the background that a human brings to the topic on the which is being written. Humans bring expertise, experience, authority and trust. AI can take human-provided elements and turn them into high-quality content.
Given how many sites with AI-generated content are receiving manual actions during the March 2024 core algorithm update, it may be time to reconsider how AI is used for content.
I planned and wrote most of this article in September 2023 and sat down because I thought, who’s going to believe me?
Now that it’s March 2024 and the SEO industry is facing a reckoning based in part on AI-generated content, people may be more receptive to considering better ways to integrate AI into their content generation workflow .
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