Since the mass release of AI tools in 2023, the world of content creation and SEO has been rapidly changing. Although Google’s response to AI was unpredictable in the beginning, they’ve settled into their position now, meaning you can adjust your own SEO strategy around it!
How is Google responding to AI content and tools? And with Google’s position, how can you change up your SEO strategy to make the most of it?
Let’s dive in.
Does Google Penalize AI Content?
While Google is usually able to detect AI-written content, they explicitly state that you won’t be penalized simply for using AI to help you create content. What you will be penalized for is creating unhelpful, poor-quality content.

How does Google measure the quality of your content? These are some of the things that are considered for content quality:
- Relevance to the topic: Keyword stuffing is a no, but your content should naturally include a lot of keywords and phrases that point to what you’re writing about and fall under the umbrella of your target keywords. Citing quality sources that are related to your article topic can also help signal the relevance and reliability of your content.
- Readability: Content needs to be easily readable to people at all reading and language levels. A lot of things will be checked here, including spelling, grammar, and general composition errors. The rating will also be affected by the simplicity of your content, including how much technical language and jargon you use, how complex your sentences are, etc.
- User experience: Good quality content is easy for people to interact with and navigate through. It has good formatting, varied content types, navigational elements, and a definable structure. One key here is that the user experience should be good for both desktop AND mobile users.
- Information depth: Long, in-depth articles tend to perform better than shallow content. Especially for information-seeking keywords, articles that cover the topic fully with around 1500-2000+ words tend to rank better than short, basic answers.
- Online interactions: Good-quality links from other websites and links from social media pages can all play into your website’s ranking. Google tends to consider pages more authoritative when they have more quality links and social signals pointing to them.
This is a basic overview of a complex set of factors that go into your Google ranking, mostly focusing on the stuff in your content itself rather than everything else that goes into SEO.
Because of the prevalence of AI generated content today, Google has been actively beefing up its quality standards to prevent spammy, stolen content from ranking highly. While AI content is not automatically penalized, it will face issues if it doesn’t live up to the quality standards imposed on every bit of content.
How to Boost Your SEO Post-AI
Knowing that the use of AI won’t automatically cancel out your SEO efforts, is there anything you can do with AI to improve your SEO?

While you probably shouldn’t just jump to fully AI-generated content right away, you have a lot of options for boosting your SEO with AI!
Here are some ideas you can implement from today.
Generate New Topics
One of the difficult parts of maintaining a content marketing campaign in the long term is keeping a fresh list of content ideas to post. Creating the content is much easier when you’ve got a list of topics to work with already, but making that list takes a lot of time!
AI can be a great resource for helping you come up with a list of content ideas really quickly. Not only can you get a solid list of topic ideas, but those ideas will be based on what people are interested in and engaging with as well.
Your best bet is using AI to stimulate your own creativity and supplement the ideas you already have. Use AI to generate a long list of titles and topics related to your niche, which you can then narrow down and improve on. Think of AI as a tool to help you brainstorm new ideas in half the time.
Use AI for Editing
Because of the importance placed on readability, editing your content thoroughly can make a big difference in how well it performs. Although editing it yourself can be tedious, AI really simplifies the work and keeps you from missing things.
While you can use AI programs to help you catch spelling and grammar mistakes, the real power they have is with scanning for readability issues. AI can help you make better word choices, simplify your sentences, and craft content that’s easy to read while still getting your point across. This is a great idea if you’re looking to snag voice search traffic, since AI tools can help you write more naturally.
Boost your content production by using AI to edit content faster and more effectively.
Generate AI Images for Content
It’s not always easy to find images that are directly related to the content you’re creating. AI image generation can help you fill in some of the gaps, making it easier to get useful images to fill out your content.

Images shouldn’t just be taking up space. They’re meant to add to the content and make your message clearer for your audience. Generating useful illustrations can improve the user experience of your content, making it more approachable and breaking up the “wall of text” effect.
Ideally, long content should be broken up by images, videos, GIFs, charts, or any other type of visually interesting content. If you have more than 300 words together without anything to break it up, it may be intimidating and difficult to read. Generating some images to break up long paragraphs could help you improve your bounce rate.
Write Outlines Quickly
Text generators aren’t always good at writing content in its entirety, but they can be highly effective for writing outlines. Not only can they help you get started with your work by putting the first few words on the page, but they can do it way faster than you would!
If you’re making any kind of video content, AI text generators can create effective script outlines. These outlines are a good starting point for automated YouTube videos or videos you’ll make for yourself.
All you have to do is give an AI chatbot or text generator a thorough prompt about the content you want and ask for an outline. Whatever it gives you will need to be refined, but this process will be much faster than sitting down and writing the entire outline from scratch.
Analyze Big Data Reports
AI tools are really good at creating summaries from huge, dense data reports. These are the kind of reports that would take you a long time to through on your own. Using an AI tool can help you quickly go through reports, find relevant data, and compile it together into a digestible piece of content.
Content that analyzes data is very linkable. If you can consistently produce content that breaks down big data reports into bite-size, usable pieces, you’re likely to improve your traffic and bring in a lot of new backlinks over time.
These reports can be excruciating to do unaided, so using AI helps you publish this type of content more regularly. Since it’s evergreen content, having more of it can be highly beneficial for your backlinks and organic traffic over time.
Above All: Think People First!
As long as your website and your content are made to help people get what they need, instead of being made to game the system, you can still be very successful with SEO supported by AI.
Search engines like Google are taking a people-first approach that prioritizes how people interact with your content. Find creative ways to use AI to continue producing the best people-focused content you can.