Every other week a client asks us the same thing: “Should I have ChatGPT write my website copy?”. Our answer is always the same: it depends on what you ask it for and what you do afterwards. AI is an excellent assistant and a poor writer on its own.
What Google actually says, without myths
Google does not penalise AI content for being AI. It penalises useless content, wherever it comes from. Its official rule is called “people-first”: content that answers real questions from real people. The problem is that AI, left alone, produces the opposite: generic text that looks right and says nothing.
Where it burns you
- Mass-producing pages. Fifty “articles” in one afternoon, all alike, all shallow. Google recognises the pattern and demotes the whole site, not just the bad pages.
- Confident inaccuracies. AI writes with certainty about things that are not true: wrong prices, non-existent specifications, laws that changed. In an e-shop that is not an SEO problem, it is a trust problem with customers.
- Content without experience. Google’s E-E-A-T criterion starts with Experience: have you seen, tried, lived what you describe? A text that could be written by anyone, for anyone, earns nothing.
Where it genuinely helps
- First draft. You provide structure, facts and tone, you get a base to work on. Cuts the time in half.
- Variations and titles. Ten versions of a headline or a product description, pick the best.
- Simplification. “Rewrite this more simply” may be the most useful prompt in existence.
- First-pass translations. A good start, never a final text without human review.
Our rule
For the content we prepare for clients, one simple filter applies: AI proposes, a human decides and adds the thing AI does not have, real experience. The numbers, the examples, the truths of the specific trade. That way the text passes Google’s filter and the stricter one: the customer who reads it.
One more thing: the same content that wins Google now also feeds the answers of AI assistants. How you appear there has its own name and its own guide: GEO, how you appear in AI answers.
Good copy also needs a site with solid technical SEO foundations: see our website development. Want copy that sells and ranks? Let us look at it together.
