Since AI writing tools became widely accessible, the amount of content being published on the web has grown enormously. For a while, some businesses saw quick wins from publishing large volumes of AI-generated articles. That window has largely closed. Google has become better at identifying content that lacks genuine contribution, and the websites that published it at scale are now dealing with the consequences.
The important nuance here is that Google is not penalising AI-generated content as such. It’s penalising content that is generic, undifferentiated and lacking in real editorial value, regardless of how it was produced.
Moz’s analysis of what they describe as garbage AI content points to a clear pattern: pages that look like hundreds of other pages covering the same topic, with no original data, no first-hand experience and no editorial voice. These pages don’t answer questions better than existing results. They just add noise.
Google’s helpful content guidance, reinforced strongly by the March 2026 core update, makes clear that it rewards content which demonstrates genuine expertise and offers something a visitor couldn’t find in essentially identical form elsewhere. A page generated by an AI tool from a prompt, published without editing and covering the same ground as dozens of competitors isn’t that.
One of the most common mistakes is assuming that more content means more traffic. For high-quality, well-targeted content, there’s a reasonable correlation. For thin content published at scale, the opposite tends to happen. You end up with a website full of pages that dilute your overall authority, consume crawl budget without contributing value and send signals to Google that your site has a lot of low-quality content on it.
This connects to the index bloat problem covered in our earlier article. The pages themselves become a liability rather than an asset.
AI writing tools are useful when they’re helping you say something you already know, more quickly. Using them to draft a blog post on a topic you have genuine expertise in, then editing that draft to add your own experience, specific examples and original perspective, produces content that is often better than writing from scratch for many people.
Using them to generate content on topics you don’t know well, without fact-checking or editorial input, produces exactly the kind of pages that Google does not want to see.
So, does this page offer something a visitor couldn’t find just as easily elsewhere? If the honest answer is no, the page needs more work before it goes live.
We produce content for our clients that reflects genuine expertise and is written to perform in search. If you’d like to talk about how we approach content as part of our ongoing work, our monthly SEO services are a good starting point. Get in touch to find out more.
