The question has been repeating since AI tools became widely available: will Google penalise a site because a machine wrote the text? The answer is no. But the answer to the question most people are really asking is yes.
What the rule is
Google’s policy is neutral on method. It does not ask who wrote the text, it asks why the text exists. Content produced primarily to manipulate rankings rather than help the person reading it is a problem regardless of whether a human or a machine produced it.
Which means good AI text is good and bad human text is bad. The tool is not the criterion.
What actually gets penalised
What Google has flagged as scaled content abuse is mass production of thin material with no editorial oversight at all. The pattern that triggers action is recognisable: a site that suddenly starts publishing hundreds or thousands of articles, all cut from the same template, none offering anything unavailable elsewhere.
Sites matching that pattern saw severe traffic drops across recent updates. Sites with fewer articles and genuine editing grew.
The practical threshold
There is no published article count at which a penalty kicks in, and anyone who quotes you one is inventing it. But the pattern is clear and you can check yourself against it with three questions:
- Would anyone read this if they had not arrived from search?
- Does it contain anything not already in the top three results for the same query?
- Did a person read it before it was published?
If all three answers are no, volume is your problem regardless of who wrote it.
A setup that holds up
A narrow topic rather than everything and anything. A realistic publishing pace rather than a sudden spike. A person who reads the text before it goes out – not to rewrite it, but to glance over it and add what the model could not know.
That last step carries most of the value. A concrete example from your own experience, a number you know and the model does not, or a view you formed doing the work – that is what keeps someone on the page.
The takeaway
AI as a writing tool is legitimate and widely used. AI as a machine for filling a site is not. The difference is not in the technology but in whether someone stands behind the content and answers for its quality.