Does AI-generated content hurt SEO?

I don’t know about you, but I get 10 emails a day now about AI articles, AI emails, GEO, AEO. And 10 AI slop emails like that is what I’d consider a slow day. AI-generated content doesn’t always hurt your website’s SEO, but it’s definitely hurting my inbox.

Does AI-generated content hurt SEO? On its own, no. Boring, samey content that says nothing and does nothing is what hurts your SEO position. Unfortunately, AI is excellent at producing those by the hundreds.

First of all though, it’s worth saying I use AI every single day of my life. I’m not here to bash AI (at least not today), I’m here to help make sure you get the best use out of it. I’ve written separately about whether AI can build a website for your business.

Does Google give a shit about AI-generated content, and does it hurt SEO?

Google’s public line is that it rewards helpful content however it was produced. Its guidance on AI-generated content says using AI or automation appropriately isn’t against its rules. The keyword here being ‘appropriately’.

What we can say definitively is Google’s spam policies go after something it calls “scaled content abuse”. That means churning out loads of pages mainly to game the rankings is a big no no. Google says they don’t care if that’s a person or a machine, but they’ll slap your wrists if you do it either way.

The bigger thing to say is that Google can’t reliably detect AI content anyway. It can’t figure out who typed a page, and they actually say they don’t try to. What they can detect is whether page 4,000 of those location pages you’ve created is the same as the other 3,999, just with a different town name.

Picture a takeaway menu with 40 dishes on it. You order three and every one turns up as the same chicken curry with a different name on the lid (the prawn bhuna has one apologetic prawn in it). Nobody needs to know who cooked it to realise something’s off.

▶Play the video: I built 317 websites and learned this

So why do some AI-written websites drop out of Google?

When somebody asks me why their AI-written website has dropped in Google and I open it up, I find some version of this when I go investigating:

• Generic content that could belong to any business in any town. If you swapped the logo you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.
• Testimonials and case studies that are either generic or just feel fake. Or worse, non-existent.
• The same services page cloned for 40 locations, with the town name changed and nothing else.
• Blog posts answering questions nobody in the UK has ever asked, like how to winterise your sprinkler system before the first Ohio frost.

We have to remember how AI is writing your content and articles. It’s an LLM, so it’s writing the average of everything it’s ever learned about and attempting to bend it to your business. It’s read the top ten results for your search and blended all that information into one smooth paste. Your AI-written content has nothing new in it.

And if we want to get your website ranking in AI search and search engines (yes, you do), you’ve got to figure out a way to write original content.

What Google wants to see that AI slop can’t make up

The stuff that’ll really get you ranking is the stuff that only you know. Your real opinions, your real prices, your real services, photos of your actual vans, real questions your real clients are asking when they call you. The point here is the word ‘real’: not some AI slop you smashed out in five minutes.

A big chunk of what people call “SEO” isn’t the words anyway. It’s all that experience and knowledge you have in your head, written down or turned into video and put on your website. AI and search wants original and authoritative content.

Wolf Laundry were spending £3,000 a month on Google Ads and getting zero leads back, because their website took ten seconds to load. We rebuilt it, the load time came down to about one second, and it now brings in 150–200 leads a month. A big part of why those leads now come in is because their team rewrote the entire website and filled it with much more content than it had previously.

Rucklidge Law is a similar story. Load time went from six seconds to two, and the site converts up to 35% better in good months. We focused on making the site feel real: showing photos of the real people you’ll work with and making sure the content was written by the solicitors.

Then there’s Glasscraft, one of the UK’s only independent glass manufacturers. We ran the same playbook again. Real photos, real people, real words, real experience. No AI.

If you haven’t worked out what I’m trying to say here yet, let me put it even more plain:

• All of your content needs to be original, based on your experiences of working in your industry.
• You could use AI to help you write that, but it still needs to be original.
• Don’t just say to ChatGPT: ‘write me 400 words about the glazing industry’. You’ve got to put your spin on it.
• Where possible, just don’t use AI at all. Use it to clean things up if you really have to.

How I use AI on content without killing your website

When I’ve got a blank page and a deadline, I’ll talk at it for ten minutes and let it give me a messy first draft. Then I rewrite most of it until it sounds like a person. When you do this, you’re still effectively ‘writing’ it from your experience.

If I’ve written a page myself and it’s gone on far too long, I’ll get AI to tidy it up and ask it to make sure I’m not repeating myself and I’ve covered off everything.

Sometimes after a long meeting with a client, I’ll run the audio recording through AI so it turns the chat into notes I can use. Most of your knowledge lives in these kinds of conversations and it doesn’t require you to sit there with a blank page.

I’ll never use AI to invent facts, write testimonials or invent client stories. Nothing I do ever gets bulk-published by AI, or bulk-written. There has to be an element of the ‘real’ in there if you want to rank your website with any kind of AI involvement.

I always ask this: could a competitor just copy and paste this into their website without changing a word, and nobody would notice. If the answer’s yes, it’s too generic and your writing style or knowledge isn’t coming out properly.

Should you pay for an AI content package?

No. But it’s a bit more complicated than that.

We use AI to help our clients discover what kinds of articles they should be writing and what their competitors are writing. We then use Data for SEO to analyse that to really figure out the gaps.

We’ll then use AI to help draft those articles, but make sure our client rewrites them or at least checks them. We make sure all articles have to be full of personal facts and figures and case studies.

We always have to remember this: your website’s job is to turn the right visitors into customers. If yours isn’t currently bringing any work in, adding more pages and AI-generated content won’t fix that. I’ve gone through why your website isn’t getting enquiries check by check, and “not enough blog posts” isn’t on the list.

If what’s keeping you up is AI Overviews eating your clicks, that’s a different worry. I looked at data from 70 UK sites for a piece on whether AI is killing website traffic.