Can Google Detect AI Content in 2024?

The proliferation of AI over the last three years alone has been nothing short of astounding. No matter where you go these days, AI is practically shoved in our faces, for both better and worse.

In many ways, AI has enhanced our lives, assisting us in ways that seemed impossible five years ago. On the other hand, the constant onslaught of AI-generated images, videos, and text can seem overwhelming and leave a sour taste in our mouths. 

If you’re a writer, you may be concerned about whether you’ll be outright replaced by AI—although those concerns are mostly unwarranted. Regardless, considering that ChatGPT can do almost instantly what it takes a real human hour to do, it’s only natural to wonder what Google might be doing to help cut back on AI content in your search results. 

After all, detecting and controlling AI content, especially the low-effort stuff with the least value, will allow Google to ensure that it’s only providing users with the most helpful results, with the best sites leading the SEO rankings.

The downside is that Google’s algorithm for its site rankings is a well-kept secret tweaked multiple times throughout the year. SEO agencies have even cropped up to try to master this moving goal post to help sites perform well on the search giant. 

So, can Google accurately detect AI-generated content in 2024? Seemingly yes—though the search giant has said that it doesn’t penalize sites for using AI or automation as long as it isn’t used for search rankings manipulation because that is against their spam policies. 

So, the short answer is yes, but the long answer is that it doesn’t actually seem to matter—at least not in the way that you might think.

AI Content’s Role in the World of SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the art of making websites rank well on Google—or any other search engine, for that matter. A host of factors go into proper SEO, from how quickly a site loads to the overall user experience. Key among these factors is, of course, content. 

Content can be anything on the site, from the images you see to the words you view to the annoying autoplay videos you pause. It’s all content—and it all affects how high a site appears on Google’s search results. For our purposes, we’re going to be talking specifically about writing.

To rank well, sites need to have high-quality content. The better the content—and other SEO factors—the better the site will perform. AI, in theory, allows sites to produce content quickly, without the need for a professional content creator, like a copywriter. 

However, it’s critical to remember that Google cares most about providing value to its users, so as long as AI-generated content is helpful, Google is okay with it. The only problem with that is that helpful AI content that adds value is easier said than done. 

With just a basic prompt, ChatGPT will give you basic results. Creating helpful AI content requires a bit more finesse and, honestly, skill. Google has ultimately gotten really good at detecting AI content and will penalize you for low-quality efforts. 

Will You Get Penalized for Using AI Content on Your Site? 

Unfortunately, this question’s answer is more complicated than a simple yes or no because Google cares about what the content is rather than where it came from. According to the company’s own developer blog, it’s obvious that not only can Google detect AI content, but it’s also more than willing to show that content to users—as long as it holds value.

For Google’s search results, a lot comes into consideration. A leading factor is having content that’s high in E-E-A-T, or, in other words: expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.  

Content that meets these requirements will be flagged by Google as helpful to its users, contributing to its SEO rankings. A site still needs to excel in all the other areas, like site speed and user-friendliness. But if the content proves helpful—even if it’s AI-generated—then it won’t necessarily be penalized. 

The content that will be penalized is what Google deems doesn’t fulfill its E-E-A-T guidelines. While typically, low-effort AI content won’t be able to meet these requirements, there’s nothing outright preventing AI content from showing up on Google. AI content just needs to be as helpful as what skilled writers can create.

How Does Google Find Content, Including AI Content?

Tools like AI Detector work by allowing users to paste or upload text to the app to be scanned for signs of AI content. Google, on the other hand, has to do that for, essentially, the entire internet. That’s the only way that it can provide users with the best search results possible. And as you might imagine, automatically scanning the internet is a far more intensive task than uploading one file to a specific app.

Each page that Google shows in its results must first be indexed, and to date, the web giant has indexed trillions upon trillions of web pages.

Image credit: Growth Memo

To index pages, Google uses Googlebot—a web crawler program that explores the internet for new and updated pages. When Googlebot finds a new page, or one that has recently been updated, it will often check what’s on the page. However, Google doesn’t crawl all pages—and you can choose to opt out of being crawled for whatever reason. 

Once Google has discovered a web page through Googlebot’s crawling, it must then be indexed. Pages with similar content get grouped together, with the site providing the best content being served first to users. But in some circumstances, these other sites might be given priority.

Separately, this crawling and indexing process helps Google establish which sites fulfill its E-E-A-T qualities. Those that do—AI-generated or otherwise—typically perform better in the search results.

Google may also use a third party, someone called a Quality Rater, who—as their name implies—helps evaluate the quality and efficiency standards of websites. While this feedback won’t directly influence search rankings, Google will often use it to evaluate potential changes. 

How E-E-A-T Factors Into High-Quality Content

While, as we mentioned earlier, Google keeps its full ranking formula under lock and key—to make it harder for people to manipulate search results—we know that E-E-A-T is important to Google. The content with the highest expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness will typically rank the best, with the last quality (trustworthiness) being the most important of the four. 

Image credit: Semrush 

Naturally, for a piece of writing to have the highest possible E-E-A-T, it will typically be written by a person, someone with a lot of expertise in their given field—maybe someone with a social media following all their own. 

That doesn’t necessarily mean that every piece of content on Google must be written by a skilled expert, but it will certainly help. And, as you might have certainly guessed by now, barebones AI content is very low in all four of the E-E-A-T qualities. 

Nothing written by ChatGPT will have any real expertise, and the repetitive, dull way it’s written certainly won’t have much authoritativeness either. And though AI bots might be able to fake a certain level of real-life experience, it won’t be enough to tell Google that an AI-written page will have any trustworthiness.  

Granted, that includes only the most basic AI-generated content, generated using the simplest of prompts. However, if you’re skilled at writing detailed prompts, you can generate some really high-quality AI products—and there’s always the option of humanizing AI content that you generate. 

The downside is that you’ll never really know how much E-E-A-T your content contains, regardless of whether it was written by a person or an AI chatbot. All you can really do is make an educated guess. However, the best place to start is ensuring that your content doesn’t read as though it was written by AI. 

In fact, a case study performed by Gotch SEO found that the search results for at least a few specific keywords, across only 487 pages (as opposed to the trillions on Google), appeared not to be AI-generated.

Image credit: Gotch SEO

The caveat here, of course, is that this case study only looked at a minuscule fraction of the pages on Google. But it’s an excellent sample size that supports a thorough analysis of the state of search. Google says that it doesn’t really care whether content is AI-generated—and we believe them—but clearly, it’s prioritizing content that appears to be written by a human.

It seems the lesson here is that most AI content doesn’t provide enough E-E-A-T to users for Google to really consider those pages good enough to show in search results, regardless of their origins. 

Leveraging an AI Detector

Successful content on Google—AI or otherwise—centers around whether it has enough E-E-A-T among other SEO facets, like site speed, to be worthy of ranking highly in search results. 

We’ve also established that Google can detect AI, and even if it doesn’t deprioritize AI content deliberately, it does typically rank lower than content that’s high in E-E-A-T. It seems that Google, like many of us, finds that content written by a chatbot is too low-effort to be valuable to users. 

Writing content high in E-E-A-T can be difficult, and Google has even said that it’s only one small part of its search ranking formula. So E-E-A-T alone won’t ensure that your pages rank well. However, it’s undeniably an important SEO aspect. 

One great way to get a good idea about how well-written, thus having more E-E-A-T qualities, your content is, and that it reads more like a human wrote it rather than AI, is to use a tool like AI Detector to scan your writing for any signs of AI. 

A great way to demonstrate your expertise is to not sound like a robot. AI detectors are surprisingly great at facilitating this goal. Whenever you scan a piece of your writing, they’ll highlight any areas that seem like they might be AI-generated. 

This analysis doesn’t necessarily mean that parts of your writing were written by a chatbot. More specifically, it will point out any low-effort areas of your writing—places where you could convey your ideas in more interesting ways. 

Ensuring E-E-A-T

While instilling as much expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness as possible won’t ensure that your content rises to the top of Google’s search results, it’s certainly a great place to start. 

While an AI detector can ensure that you’re letting nothing low-effort slip through the cracks, showing a high level of E-E-A-T might take more effort. 

Expertise and experience: Google prefers it when content is written by someone who’s an expert in their field and can show it. So, if you can call from your own personal experience in whatever you’re writing with anecdotes or references, that can be a great way to show your expertise. 

AI also typically isn’t the best fact-checker, so by backing up your words with the most authoritative sources possible, you’ll be showing that your words can be trusted. Longer-form content, typically between 2,000 and 3,000 words, is also more likely to provide the necessary E-E-A-T qualities. 

The Future of AI Content and Google

Google always strives to ensure the best possible results show up whenever you type in a search—not the sites that have successfully cracked Google’s formula and begun tuning their site and content specifically to manipulate search results. 

That’s why Google changes the system it uses to figure out search results so often. It not only ensures that only high-effort results are showing up, but it also motivates sites to produce better content that meets SEO best practices.

Most recently, Google switched things up again, focusing more on expert—and experiential—content as a way to help filter out low-effort results from the top of the searches. While this change, understandably, affected the rankings of low-effort content produced by AI, it also affected a lot of content written by humans, too. 

Google will undoubtedly continue to update its system over time as new SEO practices are developed—and new AI models are released (GPT-5 is just around the corner, after all). 

Final Words

The funny thing is that it’s almost irrelevant whether Google has an AI detector of its own that’s constantly scanning web pages. The search giant has certainly taken steps to ensure that low-effort content is not leading in the search results—and often, this applies to AI-generated writing. 

Google cares most about providing helpful results, and if a chatbot has somehow produced a really helpful piece of content that seems as though a trustworthy expert with authority has written it, that content might appear decently high in search results. 

However, at the end of the day, humans continue to be the best source of content. These true experts are capable of providing content built on their own tangible experiences in a way that exhibits authority and encourages a lot of trust—and Google eats that up. 

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Google penalize AI-generated content automatically?

Not exactly. Google doesn’t blanket-ban AI-generated content—it’s more about the quality than the source. If your content is low-effort, generic, or doesn’t genuinely help readers, it could end up lower in search results. But AI content that’s solid, informative, and useful? Google’s algorithms have no issue with that.

What’s the best way to optimize AI content for Google?

To give AI content the best shot at ranking, make sure that it’s high in  E-E-A-T: expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. After drafting content with AI, add your own insights, double-check for accuracy, and format it for engaging reading. In short, aim for the same level of quality as you would if it were entirely written by a human.

Can AI content still rank well on Google?

Yes, AI content can absolutely rank. But there’s a catch—it has to meet Google’s standards. If it checks all the boxes for expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, it can hold its own in search results. When AI content is handled well, it’s fair game.

How can I ensure my AI content won’t be flagged by Google?

To keep AI content safe from ranking low in search results, make it look and feel as close to human writing as possible. Add your own knowledge, fact-check it, and format it so that it feels natural and polished. Google isn’t so concerned with how content is made; it just has to be genuinely valuable to readers.