Google states that autogenerated content “In cases where it’s intended to manipulate search rankings and not help users, Google may take actions on such content.”
Google’s John Mueller is also on record stating that AI generated text content is considered spam:
“For us these would, essentially, still fall into the category of automatically generated content which is something we’ve had in the Webmaster Guidelines since almost the beginning.
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 for us it’s still against the Webmaster Guidelines. So we would consider that to be spam.
…But for us, if we see that something is automatically generated, then the webspam team can definitely take action on that.”
And perhaps in a sign of the fast pace of technological evolution, there are gray areas within Google’s prohibitions on auto-gen content.
For example, using automatic text translation to generate content is against the guidelines except in cases where a human reviews and curates the content.
Google also allows automatic generation of meta descriptions, presumably because meta descriptions are not used for ranking purposes.
AI Generated Images
Given that AI generated content might qualify for ranking in Google Images, one would think that AI generated images are also prohibited.
But apparently, that’s not the case.
The only reservation John Mueller had about AI images is that the technology is based off image datasets and so the ability to generate an image is limited to what’s in that library of images it was trained on.
AI Images Currently Okay?
Apparently the use of AI images within a website is okay.
Although autogenerated text content is prohibited/limited for ranking in Google Search, surprisingly there was no similar prohibition or caveat discussed about AI generated images and ranking in Google Images.
