No, AI content will not get you a penalty
Will you get penalized for using AI to write content? This question has always come up in every podcast and presentation where I have been a guest this last year.
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Will I get penalized for using AI to write content? This question has always come up in every podcast and presentation where I have been a guest this last year. It might seem like a nuanced question, but in my opinion, the answer is very clear: no.
Using AI to create content is as much of an “SEO cheat” as using a spreadsheet to produce quantitative forecasts.
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While some say that AI's mere presence in content creation threatens rankings and visibility, this perspective misses the broader point: AI content itself is not inherently problematic for SEO. Instead, the real issue lies in the quality and usefulness of the content being produced, whether from a machine or a human.
To elaborate on my point of view, it’s worth exploring how content creation has evolved, how quality has always been the determining factor in SEO success, and why the tools or source (full-time writers, contractors, Fiverr, Upwork, etc) used to generate content are not the root of the problem.
User value
Content for SEO is supposed to deliver value for users and not just fill words on a page. There was a time when this wasn’t the case, and I will confess to a decade+ ago, I even used Wordpress plugins that created gibberish that somehow attracted search traffic that I monetized with Adsense. Today, this level of useless content would likely never be indexed long enough to attract a penalty.
All search engines, not just Google, have spent decades refining their algorithms to prioritize content that effectively answers queries, provides value, and engages readers.
This is the bar that needs to be met.
The introduction of AI tools, many already in use that predated the popularization of ChatGPT, is not the issue if they meet that threshold. Grammarly, which I use on every word I write, is an AI tool that theoretically writes for me as I trust it to reorder sentences, but at no point does it impact the value imparted by the words I write.
For those who are paranoid about an AI penalty, even a grammar checker that replaces words with synonyms and restructures written words should be too much because it could leak an AI bat signal.
The truth is, this is a misplaced fear.
Low quality content isn’t new
There are genuine concerns that an influx of machine-generated content would force search engines to penalize anything that reads like AI. Yet, this fear assumes that AI is uniquely responsible for subpar content, overlooking historical realities. Low-quality content has been a persistent issue long before AI, often fueled by human writers.
Freelance marketplaces like Fiverr, Freelancer, and Upwork democratized content creation, allowing businesses to hire writers at scale for very low costs. A quick browse through these sites reveals gigs offering 500-word blog posts for as little as ten dollars, often completed within hours. That is not high quality.
For years, companies doing checkbox SEO have used these resources to churn out articles, product descriptions, and landing pages, hoping to flood their sites with keyword-stuffed material that someone convinced them was required for SEO.
The output was always the same: thin, poorly researched, and keyword-riddled gibberish that offered little value to readers. Grammatical errors, awkward phrasing, and a lack of depth were typical hallmarks of this output. Yet, I have never seen a Tweet, LinkedIn post, or blog post posing a similar question to the one I started this newsletter with: “Will using Upwork/Fiverr to write content get me penalized by Google?”
The issue is not the platform, it is the content
Just as a cheap gig on Fiverr or Upwork might produce a shallow, keyword-crammed article, an AI tool prompted with no instructions can spit out generic, uninspired text.
The opposite is true: a skilled freelancer on any platform, given clear direction and fair compensation, can craft a well-researched, compelling piece that satisfies searchers. Similarly, an AI tool prompted by someone who understands how to refine prompts, edit output, and tailor it to a specific audience can generate content that rivals or surpasses human efforts.
An excellent prompt might even mean writing most of what you intend to say and then having the AI engine refine it into well-written and constructed prose. Yes, the AI engine “wrote” the content, but this isn’t that much different than a spreadsheet producing a final result.
The source isn’t toxic
Search engines don’t care about the content creator; they only require it to be valuable to users to earn a spot in the index. Making a blanket rule to ban content created by AI wouldn’t serve that purpose. When AI produces a detailed guide that accurately addresses a topic and keeps readers engaged, there’s no logic to suggest it would rank lower than a human-written equivalent. Conversely, a human writer churning out fluff to meet a word count will struggle to compete, just as they always have. This underscores a key point: the quality bar hasn’t changed since AI’s arrival; logically, it should not.
Quality has been a requirement for a long time
This requirement of providing value long predates AI. In the early SEO days, the internet was littered with content farms. The prevalence of this sort of content and other manipulative SEO efforts forced Google to launch the Panda algorithm in 2011.
The sites hit by that update were impacted because the content itself did not provide value, not because of other metrics like who created it and how much there was. The Helpful Content Updates are just the modern-day versions of those updates, and they evaluate content quality similarly.
AI only changes the scalability of low-quality content
AI poses a unique challenge because of its speed and scalability, potentially flooding the web with mediocre material faster than humans ever could. This is a concern, but it only changed the budget calculation. Freelance platforms have long enabled unlimited content production, constrained only by delivery speed and willingness to pay. AI is an efficiency and price difference, not intent.
A marketer determined to cut corners could hire a team of cheap writers to crank out high volumes of garbage. AI makes it easier and faster, but ease of access doesn’t dictate quality.
Humans change everything
The ideal approach is to intersect AI and freelance content with internal human oversight. AI content is rarely published raw, just as freelance work is typically reviewed before going live. Editors refine AI output, adding nuance, verifying facts, and ensuring it aligns with a brand’s voice.
Before AI, a freelancer platform client ideally would revise a freelancer’s draft to improve clarity or depth. In all scenarios, the final product reflects a blend of the initial creator's and the internal employee’s (or freelancer's) human judgment. This hybrid approach further blurs the line between “AI content” and “human content,” reinforcing that the result is what matters, not the process behind it.
With proper guidance, AI can generate drafts that save time, requiring humans to finalize them. This mirrors how companies have always used freelancers: as a starting point, not a finished product. Ultimately, the measure of content hinges on its ability to meet user intent and provide value, not on whether it was typed by human hands or generated by code.
Google and other search engines promote and demote the essence of content, not the source or author.
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