Google Recommends AI Content from Bard to Write Blog Posts

Google sent out an email today, titled Helpful tips for using Bard, that actually encourages people to use Bard (their answer to ChatGPT) to write blog posts.

The header of the email includes this:

Bard can outline your blog post about summer mocktail recipes

Here’s a quote from the body of the email:

If you want help with something like a blog post, give Bard details. For example, you can ask Bard to add a new section to what you’ve already written, like “write a 4th section on watering tips to add to my blog post about gardening”.

Bard will generate multiple response drafts, so you can choose the best starting point for you.

If you ask Bard to write blog posts or sections of blog posts, it doesn’t write outlines. In the body of the email Google is suggesting a Bard prompt that generates actual blog content.

What Does It Mean?

I don’t consider Google’s email to be an endorsement to use AI to write website content.

Bard is still officially called “an experiment by Google” and it’s possible that the people working on Bard or creating the marketing emails have little knowledge of the SEO issues around it.

Even people from Google Search sometimes say things that turn out to not be true or that get reversed once Google finds out that they aren’t working for their business goals. Two examples that come to mind are “PageRank sculpting” and how “nofollow” links are treated.

So I don’t think that Google’s email means that people should start using AI to write content “because Google said it’s okay”. Even if nothing else changes, it probably isn’t a good idea.

Once something becomes easy, then many people will do it. If you can instantly produce a 100-page website about gardening using AI tools, so can anyone, and there is little value in the content any more.

As the AI-generated weeds start growing, search engines will have to adjust their algorithms to trim the weeds. “Easy” doesn’t necessarily mean “good for your business” — it also means a lower barrier to entry, which creates more competition.

Even if a site uses AI content ethically, but contains signatures of AI content that are mistaken by search engines as being spammy, the site might become collateral damage on a future Google update.

Some people will have success with AI-generated content, but I think it’s a good idea to be extremely cautious.

I think there’s a bigger SEO problem coming though.

Google Might Not Care Either Way

I actually think that Google might not really care if you use AI in the future, because if your blog post can be written by AI, Google and Bing are going to give the answer right in the SERPs without sending people to your website.

The entire genre of Web content that provides quick answers may soon become irrelevant from an SEO perspective.

AI can generate listicles. It can analyze sentiment from product reviews across the entire Web. If your content isn’t better than what AI can produce, there’s no reason for Google or Bing to send people to your site.

The number of clicks that search engines send to websites is going to decrease, and that means that the pie is going to be smaller. There will also be more people competing for the smaller pie, because it’s nearly effortless to “write” content using AI.

How to Survive

Websites Likely to Survive

I think a couple of types of websites that will survive are:

1. Strong brands that people search for directly. If someone searches for your brand, Google and Bing will know that you are looking for a specific site and that will be the answer. If you’re looking for Target, then target.com is probably the answer to your question. Separating your own site from the AI weeds that are sprouting up might involve creating a strong brand. Those brands might lose a lot of long-tail searches to AI chatbots though.
2. Websites that provide in-depth information that AI can’t easily answer will probably still do well. If someone is looking for an answer to a question like “how do I do joins in SQL?”, Google and Bing will be able to provide the answer right in the SERPs. But if someone wants to know “how do I learn SQL?” they will need something more comprehensive (for now).

I think that learning how to code might also help SEOs survive what is coming, because if you know how to code you can build something more than just content for search queries that AI will soon be answering directly.

SEO for Apps

If search engines stop sending traffic for short queries and long tail keywords, companies might try to focus more on SEO for apps. Once a company gets users to install an app, it becomes less reliant on search.

New Schema Types

As AI search becomes more developed, I wonder if search engines will begin to support new types of schema/microformat data that will display website information in the AI responses in a format that fits in with the new look of the SERPs. That could be a way for them to send a bit of support to websites even as they brutally decimate the Web.

SEO is an industry largely driven by content, and it seems like search engines are about to make content much less important.