AI is getting over the market very fast. Technologies are evolving, and soon AI will be the new normal. When the AI-generated content is increasing so vigorously, then content detection is a requirement.
Getting straight to the question of whether can search engines detect AI. The answer is YES, search engines can detect AI. Let’s get deeper to understand better.
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What is AI?
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of a machine stimulated by human intelligence. The piece of writing generated by a machine based on human inputs is called AI-generated content. Currently, 52% of marketers are using AI for content generation.
The first use of AI in content creation was article spinner. these article spinners used the main article and rearrange them and repost. this made the article look new but had the same meaning. the AI techniques evolved where the article spinner required an initial piece of content first the latest AIs like ChatGPT need only a prompt to create an article.
With this new revolution in the content marketing industry, people are creating excellent content very easily. However AI-generated content is not always 100% correct.
Can Search Engines detect AI?
YES! Search engines detect AI. They use several machine learning algorithms to find AI-generated content. Search engines apply these algorithms to identify AI patterns. Google’s webspam team can find AI.
The AIs still are not as creative as humans. They use specific patterns such as the structure of the text being repetitive or the grammar and syntax being correct but lacking human touch. The AI tools may also create low-quality content.
There are two types of SEO communities ethical and less ethical. The ethical community uses genuine and good content to rank on SERP. While the less ethical community uses different tactics to rank higher. Search engines work with ethical ones. Therefore detecting AI content is important.
However, the ultimate goal is to provide useful content to the visitors. So, if your content is of rich quality and helps users. The origin of the content doesn’t matter to search engines.
Danny Sullivan from Google mentioned that they are open to all types of content. He says AI-generated content is not bad. We believe content should be primarily written for human use rather than just for search engines.
Google Webmaster Guidelines For AI Content
According to Google’s John Mueller, content generated automatically with AI tools was considered spam. He says such contents are against webmaster guidelines. For Google automatically generated content falls in the category of web spam.
Until April 2022, Google’s webmaster was totally against AI-generated content. Google revised its webmaster guidelines in October 2023 and renamed it google search essentials. The guidelines have the following suggestions for AI-generated content:
- The content should fulfill the E-E-A-T criteria, that is expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
- Google now believes AI can build helpful content. So the criteria will be evaluating content based on the content quality only. The origin of the content doesn’t matter.
- Using AI for creating content that manipulates ranking in search results is against Google’s guidelines.
- The content is judged only on its quality and not by its origin. So even if you are creating content through AI and it is good enough, nothing to worry about.
- Text having keywords that don’t make relevant sense will be considered spam. Rephrasing text created from scraps etc. will still be a penalty point.
Google’s main is to prevent spam and poor-quality content. As long as your content is relevant and liked by the users, you can rank on SERP.
Why Do Search Engines Not Prefer AI Content?
You cannot expect 100% accuracy for the data and content from AI content creator tools. These tools get suggestions from the pre-feed data that may or may not be accurate. Lets us see some points where AI content is a wrong choice:
The complexity of the text:
AI cannot alter or monitor the complexity of the text for better human understanding. The fields like health and finance can’t rely on AI content.
Violation of Google policies:
Google says if you are using AI, it is technically shuffling of words and phrases. Therefore, will fall in the category of spam. Based on research Google observed that all the AI content companies have a signature style different from humans that are easy to detect.
Hard to rank:
AI-generated content and search engine detection are growing at a phenomenal rate. It is harder for such content to rank higher on SERP.
Low-quality content:
As mentioned above, AI-generated content is just a shuffling of words. This means there are chances of duplicate content because AI uses previous data on the internet to form new content. Hence lowers the quality of the content.
Lacks authority:
AI content lacks expertise touch in the content. This may lead to adverse effects on your brand’s reputation.
We can conclude that artificial intelligence is not intelligent enough to beat human intelligence. AI is a revolution however, users still want answers from humans, not machines. If your website is lacking human touch, there are chances for you to get penalized by search engines.