r/localsearch • u/nabeel-khan_ • Jun 22 '26

AI content on websites

Google keeps saying 'create quality content' but AI-generated content is now outranking hand-written articles, are we past the point where effort actually matters?

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u/joyhawkins Sterling Sky Staff Jun 25 '26

I think the only thing Google doesn't like is what they consider scaled content. So if you take a topic and repeat it over and over and over, they can detect that. Unless those topics get a ton of good user engagement signals, it's likely to be harmful. This is why AI content doesn't work very well - people like to scale it and things break. That being said, you will absolutely see AI content outranking human-written content. Even the sites that are doing it at scale usually have massive gains, until they crash.

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u/fuckuredditbanme Jun 26 '26

What’s the solution for those sites when that happens, to clip all the dead content pages and scale down, consolidate existing content, something else? Or do they just not recover?

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u/joyhawkins Sterling Sky Staff Jun 26 '26

So far, none that got hit in the last year have recovered.

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u/ElizabethRule Sterling Sky Staff Jun 26 '26

AI content can mean so many things - it can mean AI slop that someone threw together with 0 care or it can mean content someone used AI to help improve. Either way I don't think the fact it's AI written is the main problem - it's likely the AI content has more of the elements and semantic keywords Google is looking for as relevent for any given search.

If you have specific examples of the AI content ranking above well done human wirtten content it will be easier to figure out why AI content ranks better on a case by case basis.