Google deranks 'people-generated' content from Search, sparks concerns over AI content dominance

Google’s recent Search update called "helpful content" generates a signal used by their automated ranking systems to ensure people see original, helpful content created for them in search results.

However, many website owners have complained that their ‘person’ generated content is being deranked and not getting preference.

This update from Google backfired and made many website owners very angry. Morgan Overholt, a freelance graphic designer, was in shock as half of her website’s traffic disappeared overnight. Website traffic refers to the number of users who are visiting the website.

Another person made a complaint in the forum for website owners, where he had properly researched and put original image and content, from which Al took away 500 words from the actual website.

The new update was supposed to help improve the search results for websites, but instead it has pulled down the websites from its rankings.

Human authorship at risk

Google's latest update, rolled out this month, brought a mix of improvements and concerns for website owners.

While it aimed to penalise web pages designed solely for search engine rankings, a significant change has raised red flags among many.

Previously, Google's definition of 'helpful content' emphasised 'helpful content written by people, for people. However, the recent twist has removed the requirement for human authorship, now stating, 'Helpful content written for people.' as found out by SEO Roundtalbe’s Barry Schwartz.

This shift has left website owners worried about the increase of AI-generated content in search results.

AI’s cleverness

The problem lies in the fact that large language models are trained on vast amounts of publicly available data in order to comprehend existing content and generate original material. These AI models cleverly replicate content from original websites, paraphrase it, and then present it to users.

This is something that Google really needs to take action on, but at the same time, it is developing AI models that do the exact same thing, so this becomes a very dangerous situation.

John Mueller controversy

John Mueller, an advocate of Google, has been trying to calm down the website owners by explaining the reason and goals for the update.

His response is very unreasonable for the owners, as according to the company, ChatGPT content is accepted, but on the other hand, he critisises the site owners for using ChatGPT.

On X, he has also told the owners that they should be the ones making high-level knowledgeable content that contributes to the web, as for now the content seems like a collection of ChatGPT generated information that has already been covered by a lot of sites.