Is AI-generated content bad for SEO?

Google's guidance focuses on whether content is helpful, reliable and made for people. Its spam policies define scaled content abuse as generating many pages primarily to manipulate rankings rather than help users, and give using generative AI tools this way as an example. The problem isn't the tool; it's mass-produced pages that add nothing new.

Where AI-assisted content tends to fail:

• It repeats what already ranks, so there's no reason for Google or an AI assistant to prefer it.
• It contains confident errors, including invented statistics and sources.
• It lacks the first-hand experience that Google's E-E-A-T guidance values.
• It's published at a volume nobody can review properly.

Where it helps: outlining, summarising research, drafting sections for an expert to rewrite, generating variations to test and checking a draft's coverage against a brief.

Google also encourages being clear about how content was made where readers would reasonably want to know. Whatever tools you use, a person with real expertise should own the final page and every claim in it.