Should Google Debug Indexing Issues With AI Driven Content?

Over the weekend a webmaster asked John Mueller of Google for assistance around why Google was not indexing his site. John looked at it quickly and noticed the site had AI driven content and then responded that Google shouldn’t be spending time on testing sites when there are other sites that need the assistance first.

John said on Twitter “should we be filtering sites / pages stronger like that which are just created for messing with / testing the algorithms?” Meaning, should Google even be indexing and ranking content that is written by machines with the purpose of testing and potentially exploiting search algorithms?

John added that he believes “that’s not something which needs to be indexed, and starting a thread without mentioning the artificial nature seems a bit misleading.”

It was not the intent of the webmaster to mislead, as we learned later in the thread but the question that John brings up is interesting. John did say just a couple years ago that machine written content may be okay with Google’s guidelines at some point. He said when this AI/ML based content is at a point where it is really done well, “I think at some point in the future, we will have to revisit this guideline and find a way to make it a little bit more granular and that it kind of differentiates between these totally spammy uses of auto-generated content and the actually pretty useful uses of automatically generated content,” he said back then.

But now, maybe we are not at that point?

Here are these tweets:

Is this the first webstory where you used that AI-generated content all the way through?

— Olesia Korobka (@Giridja) October 16, 2021

Should we be filtering sites / pages stronger like that which are just created for messing with / testing the algorithms? That’s not something which needs to be indexed, and starting a thread without mentioning the artificial nature seems a bit misleading.

— ???? John ???? (@JohnMu) October 17, 2021

Sorry John I haven’t expressed myself correctly. While we used some NLG for the intro text the Streamlit webstory hasn’t been human curated and hasn’t been correctly indexed not because of its nature but presumably for a technical problem.

— Andrea Volpini (@cyberandy) October 17, 2021

I should have known seeing how it’s from you :-).

— ???? John ???? (@JohnMu) October 17, 2021

What do you all think?

Forum discussion at Twitter.