Search guidance does not prohibit content produced with AI. It prohibits content produced primarily to manipulate rankings rather than to help a reader, whoever or whatever wrote it. The distinction is about purpose rather than about tooling.
Short answer
Search guidance treats AI-written content the same as any other content. What matters is whether the page was made to help a reader or to manipulate rankings. Mass-produced pages with no added value are a spam problem regardless of how they were written, and a carefully edited AI-assisted page is not.
The published position is that automation used to produce content for readers is acceptable, and automation used to produce content for rankings is not. The test named is whether the material is helpful, reliable and made for people.
There is no rule requiring you to disclose that a tool was involved, and no rule banning a particular tool. The spam policies target scaled content abuse, which is defined by purpose and by scale rather than by authorship.
Read the primary source rather than commentary about it. Our page on search essentials covers where the guidance lives and which parts a small business site actually has to satisfy.
On one side sits a page written with help from a tool, checked by somebody who knows the subject, and carrying information the reader could not get from a generic source. That page is fine and always has been.
On the other sits a thousand pages generated from a spreadsheet, each swapping a town name, none reviewed by anybody. That is the doorway pattern our page on doorway pages describes, and it fails on its own terms.
The uncomfortable middle is a page produced quickly, skimmed rather than reviewed, and published because it reads plausibly. Plausible is not the same as correct, and that gap is where most of the real risk sits.
The policy names the production of many pages whose main purpose is to rank, with little value to a reader. The word scaled does the work. A handful of thin pages is a quality problem; thousands is a policy problem.
Scale by itself is not the fault. A large site where every page answers a different real question is not abusing anything. The fault is volume without difference, which our page on thin content covers.
This is why we strip the distinguishing token before measuring how similar our own pages are. If two pages differ only by a town name, they are the same page, and no amount of word count changes that.
None of the practices below is difficult. They are the ordinary habits of publishing responsibly, and they happen to be exactly what the guidance describes when it talks about content made for people.
There is no obligation to label a page as AI-assisted for search purposes. Whether to tell readers is a separate judgment, and it depends more on your trade and audience than on any published rule.
Where disclosure clearly matters is authorship claims. Attributing a page to a named expert who never read it is a misrepresentation, and it is the part of this subject most likely to cause real trouble.
Our position on this site is simple. Everything is checked by somebody accountable for it, the pages say when they were reviewed, and no claim appears that we could not support if asked. Nothing here is legal advice.
In our experience it is rarely the writing tool. It is volume without review, claims nobody checked, figures that trace to nothing, and near-duplicate pages published to cover every phrasing of one query.
Each of those failures is visible to a reader, a crawler or an answer engine without knowing anything about how the page was produced. That is the point. Quality systems assess the page, not the process, and a good page survives whatever made it.
The inverse also holds. A hand-written page that is thin, unsourced and duplicated three times fails for the same reasons. Blaming automation for a quality problem misses where the problem actually lives.
Decide in advance what a tool may do and what it may not. Drafting, restructuring and summarizing are low risk. Asserting facts, describing credentials and writing about what your business did are not.
Then put a person in the loop who can tell the difference. Our page on human review sets out what that review has to cover and how long it actually takes.
Written down, that policy takes a page and settles most arguments before they start. It also gives you something to show a client or a regulator who asks how your content is produced.
No. The published guidance targets content produced primarily to manipulate rankings rather than to help readers, whoever wrote it. A reviewed, accurate, useful page is acceptable. A thousand unreviewed near-duplicates are not, regardless of authorship.
There is no search requirement to do so. Whether to tell readers is a separate judgment based on your trade and audience. What is never acceptable is attributing a page to a named expert who did not review it.
There is no number. The question is whether each page answers something different and useful. A large site of genuinely distinct pages is fine. A small site of near-duplicates has a problem that more pages would worsen.
Producing many pages whose main purpose is ranking rather than helping readers. The defining features are volume and sameness. Pages that differ only by a swapped town or service name are the clearest example.
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