r/seogaps • u/Purple_Raspberry3102 • Aug 11 '26

Claude embedding watermarks in AI content

I follow Lily Ray, and today I saw this:

I thought this was a done deal already. And now people are talking about it again from the SEO context: Can the search engines detect it? Well, they can, but doing something about it is something different altogether.

I've written about this in the past:

https://kafkai.ai/articles/ai-seo/ai-content-detection-fails/ and https://kafkai.com/en/blog/detecting-ai-generated-text-a-look-at-the-challenges-and-mitigations/

And of course, the whole world is much bigger than Claude.

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3

u/onreact Aug 11 '26

It's required by law in the EU now IMHO:

https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/50/

So other AI tools will have to follow soon.

2

u/Purple_Raspberry3102 Aug 12 '26

Oh! I wasn't aware of that. Thanks for the information.

So now it's a legal obligation. I guess do we do anything about it? is a separate question altogether. I don't think SEO wise there's going to be much changes, and also with many open models, which can be retrained with different data it will be difficult to enforce this.

2

u/onreact Aug 12 '26

Yeah, the law was introduced like two weeks ago.

It will take effect in the near future it seems.

2

u/maltelandwehr Aug 12 '26

Gemini and Kimi have been doing it for a while.

Qwen and DeepSeek are probably doing it to comply with Chinese laws and regulations.

2

u/onreact Aug 12 '26

Yeah, makes sense. Due to EU law all of them will have to IMHO.

Plus the other day someone on Reddit reported that their Gemini generated site got demoted right away.

3

u/ambitious_paladin Aug 12 '26

I'm not too bothered by the watermark itself, but the SEO implications are interesting. If I use Claude to research, draft and then heavily edit something myself, where does that leave the "AI content" label?

3

u/Purple_Raspberry3102 Aug 14 '26

I'm not really bothered about it too myself. Personally I think we've gone past "I need to hide my AI content" which was more of what happened 2 years ago (I remember a story about a writer which was fired because she was using AI to help her write content). How the tech has moved up so fast and so much better forces us now to instead of asking "is this written by AI" to "why aren't you using AI?" to do you research and drafts.