Generative AI (such as ChatGPT) is about to unleash a tsunami of waffle onto the internet. One of the questions many people are asking is: “Should we avoid it if we’re dependent on search engine traffic? Will Google penalise us for filling up our websites with low-quality, machine-generated articles?”
I think the answer is yes and no. Yes, we should be worried about the consequences of filling up our websites with low-quality articles. But it’s always been that way. It doesn’t really matter who or what generated them. Google can already judge if a site is full of great quality, original, authoritative material, or whether it was written by people who neither knew about, nor cared about, their subject. It’ll cope with an increase in the size of the problem, I’m sure.
Many of us are irritated that the website we’ve worked so hard on doesn’t seem to rank as highly as we believe it should. But in most cases, the top sites are pretty decent quality nowadays. I don’t see Google having to change its rules, and I certainly don’t see any deluge of low-quality content from ChatGPT changing the top results much. Who cares whether the content was written by a man or machine? All that matters is if it’s useful and accurate …or not.
As an aside…
…have you thought of using ChatGPT for proof-reading yet? It works pretty well.