What Google’s New Stance on AI-Generated Content and Search Rank Means for Digital Marketing Courses

For many digital marketers and digital marketing educators, the most promising aspects of artificial intelligence are the large language modelling (LMM) tools such as ChatGPT and Google Bard, which allow users to spontaneously generate huge volumes of text on any subject. This technology is already massively changing many digital marketers’ approach to copywriting, content marketing, and other writing-intensive aspects of their jobs. Suddenly, writing tasks that may have taken hours to complete manually can be drafted by an AI tool in minutes, drastically reducing the workload and improving the productivity of human writers.

However, alongside the excitement surrounding these AI-powered language models, concerns have been raised within the digital marketing community regarding whether using AI-generated content may negatively impact a website’s rank on search engines like Google. Thankfully, Google has recently clarified their position on AI-generated content and how it can impact search rank. With that in mind, this newsletter will examine Google’s new position on AI-generated content and give digital marketing educators some practical guidance for teaching their students how to work with AI-generated content.

Google and AI-Generated Content

On June 15th, Google hosted a Search Central Live event in Tokyo. During the event, they offered some useful insights into their evolving stance on ranking AI-generated content. Most notably, Gary Illyes, an analyst on the Google Search team, revealed that Google does not aim to distinguish between content that is AI-generated and content that is written by a human, and will not directly punish websites that host AI-generated content simply because it was generated by an AI.

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This represents a substantial shift in Google’s position on AI-generated content. As recently as last year, Google claimed that content generated by LLM tools such as ChatGPT would be classified as automatically generated content, which is against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. In a Search Central livestream in April of 2022, Google’s John Mueller said:

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For us, if you’re using machine learning tools to generate your content, it’s essentially the same as just shuffling words around, or looking up synonyms, or doing the translation tricks that people used to do…My suspicion is maybe the quality of content is a little bit better than the really old school tools, but for us it’s still automatically generated content, and that means it’s still against the Webmaster Guidelines. So we would consider that to be spam.

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Of course, a lot has changed since April of last year. Not only have LMM tools become more sophisticated, but Google itself has unveiled a wide range of tools for AI content generation, so it makes sense that they would also be updating their policy on AI-generated content. In February of this year, Google published a post on their Search Central blog that added some interesting nuance to Mueller’s livestream comments:

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Using automation—including AI—to generate content with the primary purpose of manipulating ranking in search results is a?violation of our spam policies…This said, it's important to recognize that not all use of automation, including AI generation, is spam. Automation has long been used to generate helpful content, such as sports scores, weather forecasts, and transcripts. AI has the ability to power new levels of expression and creativity, and to serve as a critical tool to help people create great content for the web.

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So, contrary to Mueller’s earlier comments, which seemed to dismiss all AI generated content as “spam,” Google’s Search Central now draws a distinction between AI-generated content that aims to manipulate search results, and AI-generated content that aims to be genuinely helpful.?

Teaching Google’s AI Policy

While Google’s position on AI generated content continues to evolve, digital marketing educators are put in a tough position. On the one hand, educators should aim to give students experience working with AI tools like ChatGPT to best prepare them for a career in digital marketing. On the other hand, introducing students to AI-generation without warning them of the risks that these platforms can pose to a website’s search rank may lead them to develop bad habits that undermine their future careers.

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Without proper instruction, students may publish unedited AI-generated content that contains syntactical errors, incomplete information, or even outright factual mistakes. All of these things can lower the quality of a website’s content, which can in turn damage the website’s search rank and negatively impact its search traffic. For that reason, it’s crucial for digital marketing educators to instruct students on the best practices for working with AI to create helpful website content.

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Understanding E-E-A-T

As mentioned above, the bottom line appears to be that Google will not penalize websites for hosting AI-generated content, provided that the content is helpful. But for digital marketing educators, this raises an important question: Namely, how does Google distinguish between helpful and unhelpful AI-generated content? To find an answer to that question, instructors can look to Google’s four-part guidelines for evaluating search quality: E-E-A-T, or experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Students can be tasked with reviewing Google’s blog posts on the topic, as well as selections from their search rater guidelines. These are both crucial resources for helping students understand what factors Google is looking at when it evaluates a website’s content.

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Creating Great Content with AI

Students can also be tasked with using an LLM tool like ChatGPT to practice creating AI-generated content on a topic of their choice. Importantly, once students have generated their content, they should be tasked with reviewing and editing their content to ensure that it is effective. This can include reviewing the content’s syntax and diction to make sure the sentences are easy to parse by a human reader. But students should also be tasked with reviewing the content ?and structure of the AI-generated writing: They can look for secondary sources to confirm any factual claims made by the LLM tool, and ensure that the piece is search engine optimized with proper subheading structure and relevant keywords. To learn more about writing search engine optimized content, instructors can check out Mujo’s Writing Digital Media Content textbook.

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When working with students, it’s important for digital marketing educators to remember that LLM tools such as ChatGPT are not replacements for human understanding or creativity. Instead, they are tools that can help digital marketers create interesting and informative content. By staying up to date on Google’s search rank guidelines and creating great content with the assistance of LLM tools, students will be well-prepared for a successful career in digital marketing.

Written by: David Shaw, Curriculum Writer at Mujo Learning Systems Inc.