Google vs. Generative AI: What the New Quality Rater Guidelines Mean for Your Content

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It’s fair to say that the AI revolution has taken the world of content marketing by storm. For better or worse, the use of AI in content marketing is now a regular part of life in the industry. 

At CopyHouse, we’re ensuring that we and our clients are informed about the use of AI technology; viewing it as a tool to be used sparingly and strategically by trained B2B content marketers with the experience, knowledge and intention to employ it responsibly. 

The concern facing the industry is that many other content creators have not been so conservative, and social media and search engines have been hit with a recent deluge of AI content: some helpful, some inarticulate, and some outright misleading. SEO content and AI now go hand-in-hand. Indeed, according to a recent post by Wired, approximately 54% of all English-language LinkedIn posts are now deemed to have been AI-written. Meanwhile, Google searches typically now turn up a swathe of AI-generated answers, leading some pessimists in the marketing world to declare ‘SEO is dead’

So, is sentiment true? Well, Google does seem to be taking the fears over AI’s newfound prevalence seriously, and has just released an updated version of its quality rater guidelines in a bid to combat low-effort content and so-called “AI slop.” In this article, we’ll examine these guidelines in detail and discuss how marketers can leverage them to produce better-quality content. Read on to learn more.

What are Google’s new quality rater guidelines?

SEO content and AI present marketers with a difficult balance to strike. Google’s recently updated quality rater guidelines appear to call for AI-derived content to be deprioritised in Google search rankings. Let’s take a look at how these rules apply:

For starters, Google has added a new AI definition to its guidelines, specifying that Generative AI is “a type of machine learning (ML) model that can take what it has learned from the examples it has been provided to create new content, such as text, images, music, and code.” However, this definition adds: “Generative AI can be a helpful tool for content creation, but like any tool, it can also be misused.”

Off the back of this, Google has now indicated that their lowest-rated content should consist of search results which are perceived as ‘spammy.’ By this, they mean video, article, or blog content which has been auto or AI generated, or reposted from other sources. Google’s quality raters are now charged with assessing search results not solely by their keywords and relevancy, but also the perceived effort put into them.” Some examples given of this kind of low-effort GenAI-driven content include:

• “Social media reposts with little additional comment or discussion.”
• “Pages with content from other sources (e.g. pages of embedded videos or pages with ‘repinned’ images) with little additional comment, discussion, or curation by the content creator of the page.”
• “‘Best’ lists based on existing reviews and lists with little original content.”

The important thing to bear in mind, is that when Google’s quality raters are assessing content (and AI-derived content in particular), they are doing so according to the ‘EEAT’ checklist:

• Experience: The content provided should come from the first-hand experience of the author. It shouldn’t be something they’ve heard about from another source and have chosen to pass off as their own wisdom.
• Expertise: The source should have some background knowledge about whatever subject they are writing about. If they don’t have that knowledge already, then they should have done a decent level of research and deep-diving into the topic to know what they’re talking about.
• Authority: The content should stem from a source with authority, operating within a content network of other responsible and like-minded content providers who have the experience, knowledge, and evidence to back up their claims. However, if the brand, source, or marketer does not yet possess the right level of authority, then they should quote or cite sources that do or reach out to thought leaders for comment. 
• Trustworthiness: The content should be reliable and fact-checked, and the brand that supports it should strive to be a reputable one. We’ve recently discussed this very topic in our white paper on the dangers posed by misinformation. In essence, this means that marketers have an obligation and a duty to ensure that their content is verifiable and does not mislead the public.

With this in mind, how should these rules influence marketers who use AI in content creation?

How to leverage Google’s new rules for better content

What this means for marketers and content creators is that relying solely on a constant stream of AI-derived content is unlikely to suffice — especially with so much lazy AI content flooding the internet. 

Instead, marketers and creators should use AI as a tool to help them fulfill the four objectives of EEAT outlined above. Gen AI isn’t a shortcut to content, but an enhancer of it, and it shouldn’t be used to simply clone content from other sources and regurgitate it for the sake of shallow clicks. 

Instead, if you are set on using AI, try to harness it for content ideation, feedback, and proofing. Many Generative AIs, such as Gemini or Microsoft Copilot, can make for effective partners, making suggestions on how to improve your content even further. 

For example, say you were looking to write an article on a subject pertinent to your industry: you’d be perfectly within your rights to use Gen AI to help you brainstorm ideas, create an article outline, find verifiable statistics or insights from reputable sources, and transcribe interviews and organise notes, before then checking your copy for errors or typos. 

In this way, the AI has optimised the content, but the figurative meat of the article itself has come from you, the human being. Great marketing is all about connecting humans to each other – and it’s through content that marketers reach out through a screen (whether through words or pixels) and make a genuine connection with complete strangers. 

Apathetic AI-derived content written for its own sake will ultimately only ever attract bots and phoney accounts. Human-led content is irresistible to human audiences, and Google’s guidelines are designed to reward that.

CopyHouse: Putting the Humanity in Content Marketing

At CopyHouse, we’re not afraid of AI in content marketing. While we’re happy to use this new tech at times, AI has to know its place. As experienced writers boasting journalistic backgrounds and a detailed knowledge of the craft of writing, we understand how to leverage this tech to create content that truly resonates with others.

CopyHouse provides strategic content marketing to tech-led B2B clients, both domestically and internationally. So, if you’d like to find out more about how we can help your marketing campaigns and content, then please contact us now.

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