Google doesn’t penalise a text because an AI wrote it. It sets aside texts that add nothing, and AI makes it possible to produce a lot of them, very fast. Google put it in writing in February 2023: it rewards helpful content, whether or not it was produced with AI. What it penalises is generating many pages with no added value to manipulate rankings. A generated text that repeats what ten other pages already say has no reason to rank above them. AI helps to structure, summarise and rephrase. The experience, the examples and the fact-checking are still yours to write. What Google said, in black and white In February 2023, Google published its position on content generated by artificial intelligence. It comes down to one idea: Google Search rewards content that is helpful and high quality, however it was produced. Writing with the help of a tool is not, in itself, a problem. What counts are the criteria Google has applied to all content for years, summed up by the acronym E-E-A-T: experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. A text that shows its author knows the subject, has practised it, and says where the information comes from, starts with an advantage that a tool alone cannot give it. What gets penalised: quantity without value In March 2024, Google added scaled content abuse to its spam policies: generating many pages with the main purpose of manipulating rankings, rather than helping readers. Among the examples Google gives: using generative AI tools to produce many pages without adding anything; stitching together content taken from other pages without added value; creating pages stuffed with searched-for keywords, but whose text makes little sense. The rule targets the method, not the tool: a hundred pages copied by hand fall under it just as much as a hundred generated pages. But AI makes this kind of production easy, which is why so many websites have tried it. Why generic text doesn’t rank Even without a penalty, an article produced in one go by an AI has a fundamental flaw: it’s made from what already exists. On average, it repeats what the pages already occupying the top results say. So it has no reason to rank above them. What makes content rank above the rest is what only it brings: an example from your business, a figure you measured, a question your customers really ask, a clear opinion, a photo of your work. That’s precisely what a tool can’t know, and what you must never let it make up. The trap of plausible mistakes AI tools write convincing sentences, including when they’re wrong: an inaccurate date, a figure without a source, a rule that has changed since. On a company website, a published mistake commits the brand. Every dated or numbered fact gets checked against its source before publication. Using AI without losing quality AI is a good assistant for part of the editorial work. It helps to: list the questions a reader has about a topic; suggest an outline, which you then reorganise around what really matters; rephrase a clunky sentence, shorten a paragraph, suggest several headlines; summarise long documentation, provided you go back to the original to check. The rest is beyond it: knowing what’s true today, what your company does differently, what your customers ask at the counter or on the phone. That’s the part that makes an article worth reading, and worth ranking. Who, how, why: Google’s three questions Google suggests three questions to ask about every piece of content. Who wrote it: is that clear to the reader? How was it produced: if automation or AI played a significant role, can the reader find that out when they would reasonably wonder? Why does it exist: to help someone, or first and foremost to attract traffic? Content that answers all three honestly has little to fear from Google’s updates. Content that exists only to attract traffic sooner or later ends up losing it. Start from real questions: your customers’ questions, and the ones Search Console shows you. Bring at least one element nobody else has: an example, a measurement, a photo, an opinion. Check every fact against its official source, and cite it. Sign the content: an author, a date, an identifiable company. Publish less, but better: one useful page is worth more than ten interchangeable ones.