October 22, 2025
Despite the fact that Google itself leverages the power of AI, SEO professionals have remained skeptical about the use of AI-generated content. Many believe that it could be penalised by Google, affecting a page’s performance in the search results.
It wasn’t that long ago that Google updated their Search Quality Rater Guidelines (SQRG) to address the use of AI-generated content.
In the scaled content abuse section of the SQRG, Google states:
‘The use of Generative AI tools alone does not determine the level of effort or Page Quality rating. Generative AI tools may be used for high quality and low quality content creation.’
AI-generated content only becomes a problem when it’s used as a ‘low-effort way to produce many pages that add little to no value for website visitors’ or when almost all of the main content on a page is AI-generated with ‘little to no effort, little to no originality, and little to no added value for visitors’ - both of these are considered scaled content abuse.
Essentially, AI-generated content is only a problem in the case of using it to churn out meaningless, unhelpful content.
Although Google has said the use of AI-generated content isn’t inherently bad, marketers have remained dubious.
That was until Ahrefs released a study, which analysed 600,000 pages, that found no evidence that Google penalises AI-generated content.
Here’s a low down on the study and its findings.
Written by Si Quan Ong with contribution from Xibeijia Guan, the study looked at 600,00 webpages in an attempt to answer the question: does Google penalise, reward, or remain indifferent to AI-generated content?
The study itself involved extracting the top 20 ranking URLs of 100,000 randomly selected keywords and analysing the pages using Ahrefs' own AI content detector.
The results:
Mixed pages were broken down further:
It should be noted that the accuracy of AI detectors isn’t guaranteed and is based on probability.
86.5% of pages in the top 20 results contain AI-generated content. And even though 4.6% of pure AI doesn’t sound like a lot, that’s still 27,600 pages in the top spots that are made up of entirely AI-generated content.
Google has previously touched on the fact that it’s not how content is produced but the quality of output that’s important.
Ahrefs’ findings corroborate this statement as the correlation between AI content percentage and position in the search results was 0.011, meaning there is essentially no connection whatsoever.
Although AI-generated content doesn’t generally affect search performance, there is some indication that Google favours content that is less AI-heavy.
Pages that featured minimal use of AI (0-30%) saw slightly higher rankings than those with some (30-70%) and Substantial (70-100%) amounts of AI.
There’s no denying that AI is a useful tool and it’s clear that Google is not adverse to the use of AI-generated content. The study shows that using AI in your content has little to no impact on rankings, however AI content must still meet the same standards for quality.
There are dos and don'ts when it comes to using AI-generated content. When leveraging AI for content creation, remember to:
Leveraging AI does require some thoughtful implementation. However, as long as your content is optimised for search engines, is well-written and formatted, and is valuable and engaging for your visitors, you can use AI-generated content without cause for concern.
If you’d like expert help creating a content marketing strategy that drives lasting results, then get in touch with us today.
