Google’s Gary Illyes recently answered the question of whether AI-generated images used together with “legit” content can impact rankings. Gary discussed whether it had an impact on SEO and called attention to a technical issue involving server resources that is a possible outcome.
Does Google Penalize for AI-Generated Content?
How does Google react to AI image content when it’s encountered in the context of a web page? Google’s Gary Illyes answered that question within the context of a Q&A and offered some follow-up observations about how it could lead to extra traffic from Google Image Search. The question was asked at about the ten-minute mark of the interview conducted by Kenichi Suzuki and published on YouTube.
This is the question that was asked:
“Say if there’s a content that the content itself is legit, the sentences are legit but and also there are a lot of images which are relevant to the content itself, but all of them, let’s say all of them are generated by AI. Will that content or the overall site, is it going to be penalized or not?”
This is an important and reasonable question because Google ran an update about a year ago that appeared to de-rank low quality AI-generated content.
Google’s Gary Ilyes’ answer was clear that AI-generated content will not result in penalization and that it has no direct impact on SEO.
He answered:
“No, no. So AI generated image doesn’t impact the SEO. Not direct.
So obviously when you put images on your site, you will have to sacrifice some resources to those images… But otherwise you are not going to, I don’t think that you’re going to see any negative impact from that.
If anything, you might get some traffic out of image search or video search or whatever, but otherwise it should just be fine.”
AI-Generated Content
Gary Illyes did not discuss authenticity; however it’s a good thing to consider in the context of using AI-generated content. Authenticity is an important quality for users, especially in contexts where there is an expectation that an illustration is a faithful depiction of an actual outcome or product. For example, users expect product illustrations to accurately reflect the products they are purchasing and screenshots of food to reasonably represent the completed dishes after following the recipe instructions.
Google often says that content should be created for users and that many questions about SEO are adequately answered by the context of how users will react to it. Illyes did not reflect on any of that, but it is something that publishers should consider if they care about how content resonates with users.
Gary’s answer makes it clear that AI-generated content will not have a negative impact on SEO.
Watch the Q&A at about the 10 minute mark:
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Besjunior
