Google’s AI Content Policy On E-E-A-T

Google’s AI Content Policy On E-E-A-T

Google’s approaches and recommendations on AI-generated content

At Google, it has long believed in the power of AI to transform the ability to deliver helpful information. Google’s ranking systems aim to reward original, high-quality content demonstrating the qualities of what we call E-E-A-T: expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Focusing on content quality rather than how content is produced is a useful guide to help deliver reliable, high-quality results to users for years.

Japanese search marketing expert Kenichi Suzuki presented at Twitter profile at Search Central Tokyo 2023 and subsequently wrote a blog post in Japanese that summarized the top insights from the event. Some of what was shared is currently well known and documented, such as it doesn’t matter to Google whether the content is AI-generated or not. For both AI-generated content and translated content, what matters most to Google is content quality.

How Google Treats AI Generated Content

Labeling AI Generated Content. AI labelling policies. A large number of marketer, which is 85.1%, now use AI in their content production workflow. AI labelling simply means letting people know if a piece of content was generated using artificial intelligence. It is all about marking your content as “AI-generated” so your users know that AI played a role in producing it. Label can be anything, like a byline, tag, watermark, etc., indicating that AI produced the content.

Many policymakers, like the European Union, are advocating for AI labelling. However, Google is taking a different stance when it comes to labelling content as AI-generated. More so considering that the search engine giants takes its E-E-A-T standards seriously. And with AI adoption becoming widespread in various industries, including digital marketing, policies and frameworks guiding its use are bound to be revised, especially around ethics, accountability, and transparency in AI applications. However, transparency will be focused on social media platforms and other platforms that publish a lot of images.

Are publishers required to label their text content as AI generated?

Kenichi Suzuki wrote that, as far as Google was concerned, it is not required to explicitly label AI content. The Googler said they are leaving it up to publishers to make that judgment call as to whether it is a better user experience or not. He also wrote that Google cautioned against publishing AI content as is without having a human editor review it before publishing. They also recommended taking the same approach with translated content, that a human should review before publishing as well.

Reminder: Natural Content is Ranked at the Top. Google commented that their algorithms and signals are based on human content, and because of that, will rank natural content at the top.

How Does Google Handle AI Content and E-E-A-T?

E-E-A-T is an acronym of Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, which was first mentioned in Google’s search quality raters guidelines, recommending that raters look for evidence that the author is writing from a position of experience in the topic.

Google’s Policy on AI content and the importance of E-E-A-T

Google has stated that AI-generated content is not flagged or distinguished from human-generated content. However, there are some significant caveats to this broad policy. Essentially, Google’s ranking systems aim to reward high-quality content. However, it is created, and this boils down to E-E-A-T. For years, Google has prioritized E-E-A-T or experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. The criteria is gauging where content on any subject would land on their search engine results.

Essentially, this means that Google does not have an immediate plan in place to flag websites, landing pages, images, videos, blogs, and other AI-generated content. But it does mean that quality content created with experience and expertise as a backbone naturally have higher ranking in their search results.

Benefits of Google’s E-E-A-T for content creators

Google’s intent is not to flag AI-generated content may seem like an ominous policy to professionals who create content, but this is not necessarily the case. Human-produced content generally has better results than AI-generated content, boiling down to the E-E-A-T principles.

Final Thoughts on evolving policies of AI

Policies on AI are evolving due to the availability of AI and its lack of trustworthiness. Mainstream media companies rushed to test AI-generated content quietly served down to reassess. ChatGPT and similar generative AI, such as Bard, were not expressly trained to create content. So perhaps it is not surprising that Google is recommending that publishers about keeping an eye on the content quality.