Does Google penalise content written with AI?

Google does not penalise content because AI helped write it. Its February 2023 guidance says it rewards "high-quality content, however it is produced." Google does act against using AI, or any method, to produce many pages without value for readers. Its spam policies call this scaled content abuse, and since March 2024 the policy applies whether automation, people or both made the pages.

Can I still use ChatGPT to write my blog posts?

Yes. Google's guidance says generative AI "can be particularly useful when researching a topic, and to add structure to original content." The condition is what happens after the draft: a person checks every fact against its source, adds details from the business's own work, removes the habits readers recognise as machine writing, and decides whether the post helps a customer at all.

How can I tell if a page on my site is slop?

Read it aloud and ask three questions. Does it contain a fact, a photo or an example that only your business could give? Has someone checked every number and rule in it against a source? Would a customer who read it know something useful they did not know before? A page that fails all three is slop, whoever or whatever wrote it.

What happens if a chatbot on my website gives wrong information?

Your business is responsible for it. In Moffatt v. Air Canada, decided in February 2024, a British Columbia tribunal ordered Air Canada to pay $812.02 after its website chatbot described a fare rule that did not exist. The tribunal wrote that it makes no difference whether information comes from a static page or a chatbot. The same applies to blog posts written by AI.

Do AI detection tools prove that a page was written by AI?

No. Wikipedia's guide to signs of AI writing warns editors not to rely only on detection tools such as GPTZero and Pangram, because they "have non-trivial error rates" and can be fooled by small changes to the text. Google judges pages on quality and value. A page that helps readers is in a good position whatever a detector says about it.

How long does it take to edit an AI draft properly?

It depends on the page, and we have not measured a figure we can quote for every case. The steps are fixed: a fact check against each source, adding first-hand details, removing the writing habits from chapter 3, and reading the page aloud. A short post with three facts takes less time than a guide with twenty, so plan the time around the number of facts to check.

Is AI slop only a problem for search rankings?

No. Search is one cost. Readers who meet empty or wrong pages trust the business less, and wrong facts can bring legal costs, as the Air Canada and Mata v. Avianca cases show. A New York judge fined two lawyers and their firm $5,000 in June 2023 for filing court decisions that ChatGPT had invented and nobody had checked.

Which page should I fix first?

Start with the pages that already bring visitors from Google, because those are the pages customers read. Google Search Console, a free tool, lists them. Read the top 10 aloud, check every fact against its source, and add one detail from your own work to each. New pages can wait until the pages that already work are in good shape.

Where do the facts in this guide come from?

Every figure and quotation in this guide comes from a source opened on 4 November 2026: Google's own documentation and guidelines, Wikipedia's guide to signs of AI writing, court decisions, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission rule on reviews, the EU AI Act and the Associated Press. Each chapter lists the sources it used, with their dates, at the end of the page.

How to avoid AI slop in your content

What AI slop is, what Google says about pages written with AI, the signs readers notice, and the editing process that lets a business use AI without publishing slop. Eight chapters, each with its own sources.

See if customers can find you

AI slop is low-quality content produced in quantity with AI. Merriam-Webster named "slop" its 2025 word of the year with that meaning. To avoid it, keep a person responsible for every page: check each fact against its source, add what only your business knows, remove the writing habits readers recognise, and publish only pages that help someone. Google says it rewards high-quality content however it is produced.

What is AI slop?

In December 2025 Merriam-Webster chose "slop" as its word of the year. The Associated Press reported the new meaning the dictionary gave it: "digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence." The word is old. It was first used in the 1700s for soft mud, and over time it came to mean anything of little value. What is new is the amount of it, because a chatbot can now produce a thousand words in seconds, and anyone with a website can publish them the same minute.

Two parts of that definition matter for a business owner: low quality, and in quantity. A single article drafted with ChatGPT and then checked, corrected and filled with real facts by someone who knows the subject is AI-assisted content. Fifty articles copied straight out of a chatbot into a blog, with nobody reading them, is slop. The difference between the two is the work a person does before the page goes live.

Google uses its own words for the same thing. The guidelines it gives to the people who rate search results describe pages whose main content is "auto or AI generated" with "little to no effort, little to no originality, and little to no added value", and they tell the raters to give such pages the lowest rating. So, let's say it plainly: slop is measured by effort and value, and a page written entirely by hand can be slop as well.

Is it a problem to use AI for content?

Many owners ask this first, and the answer from Google has been the same since February 2023. In a post titled "Google Search's guidance about AI-generated content", Google wrote that its systems reward "high-quality content, however it is produced". The same post says: "Using AI doesn't give content any special gains. It's just content."

What Google does punish is the use of AI to manipulate rankings. Its spam policies name a practice called scaled content abuse, and the first example on the list is "using generative AI tools or other similar tools to generate many pages without adding value for users". In March 2024 Google widened that policy so it applies "whether automation, humans or a combination are involved". On 26 April 2024 Google said the changes of that spring had brought 45% less low-quality, unoriginal content into its results.

So AI is allowed, and slop is the risk. A business that uses AI to research, to organise its notes or to write a first draft is doing nothing wrong. A business that uses AI to fill its site with pages nobody needed is taking the risk that Google's spam policy describes.

Why slop costs a business more than it saves

The obvious cost is search. A page that adds nothing new gives Google little reason to show it above the pages it copied from. There are other costs, and some of them are decided by a court.

In February 2024 a British Columbia tribunal ordered Air Canada to pay a customer $812.02 because the chatbot on its website had described a bereavement fare rule that did not exist. Air Canada argued that the chatbot was responsible for its own words. The tribunal called this "a remarkable submission" and wrote: "It should be obvious to Air Canada that it is responsible for all the information on its website." That reasoning reaches every page on a business website, including a blog post a chatbot wrote and nobody checked.

In June 2023 a New York federal judge fined two lawyers and their firm $5,000 for filing a brief that cited court decisions ChatGPT had invented. The judge wrote that "there is nothing inherently improper about using a reliable artificial intelligence tool for assistance", and then explained that the lawyers had a duty to check. The same duty sits with every business that publishes.

Then there is the reader. A customer who reads three paragraphs of empty phrases learns one thing about the business: that it did not take the time. Trust, says Google's rater guide, "is the most important member of the E-E-A-T family", the set of qualities (experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust) that Google asks its raters to look for.

Five habits that keep AI help useful

Every chapter of this guide comes back to the same five habits. They are simple to describe, and each one takes real time, which is precisely why slop skips them.

A named person owns every page. Someone at the business reads it in full before it goes live and answers for every sentence, the way the Air Canada tribunal expected.
Every fact is checked against its source. Google's own guidance says generative models "don't retrieve facts, but predict a likely sequence of words", so every number, rule, date and name is opened at its source and confirmed.
Each page carries what only the business knows. Photos of real jobs, the questions customers ask on the phone, the prices of past projects, the local rules the team deals with. Chapter 5 explains how to collect them.
The writing habits that readers recognise are removed. Words like "delve" and "testament", sentences built on "not X, but Y", lists of three added for rhythm, and endings that sum up what was just said. Chapter 3 lists them.
The business publishes fewer pages, each one with a reason to exist. A page answers a question a real customer asks. If the business cannot name that customer, the page waits.

What each chapter covers

The table below lists the eight chapters, with the question each one answers. Read them in order the first time, then keep chapter 4 (the editing process) and chapter 6 (checking facts) open while you work.

The eight chapters of this guide and the question each answers
Chapter	The question it answers
1. What AI slop is	How do you tell AI-assisted content from slop on your own site?
2. What Google says	Which rules apply to pages written with AI, in Google's own words?
3. The signs of AI writing	Which words, sentence shapes and formats make readers think a page was machine-written?
4. The editing process	What are the steps from AI draft to a page you can publish?
5. First-hand experience	What can a business add that no chatbot can write?
6. Checking facts	How do you check every number, rule and name before it goes live?
7. Bylines and disclosure	Who should sign a page, and when should you say AI helped?
8. Publishing at scale	How many pages is too many, and when does volume turn into a spam problem?

Where to start this week

You do not need to rewrite your whole site in a weekend. Start with the pages that bring visitors and enquiries today, because a reader is most likely to meet them first. Google Search Console, which is free, shows which pages those are.

Chapter 4 turns these steps into a process you can repeat for every new page. Keep a short record of what you changed on each page and when, together with the sources you opened. When a fact changes later, that record tells you exactly which pages to update.

List the 10 pages with the most visits from Google over the last three months.
Read each one aloud from start to finish. Mark every sentence you would never say to a customer on the phone.
Open the source of every number and every rule on those pages. Correct or remove what you cannot confirm.
Add one fact from your own work to each page: a photo, a past project, a question a customer asked last month.
Check the page title and the description under it in Google. Google's guidance says the same review applies to titles, descriptions and the text that describes images.
Only after that, decide whether any new pages are needed, and for which customer.

How we approach this at Licheo

We use AI every day, because it lets a small business have the kind of content work that large companies pay whole teams for. For that reason we hold our own pages to the rules in this guide. Every figure in these chapters comes from a source we opened on 4 November 2026, and each chapter lists those sources with their dates. Our site's build stops a guide page that contains a long dash character, one of the habits chapter 3 describes, before it can be published.

The truth is that the rules are simple to state. Following them on every page, every week, is the hard part, because publishing without checking is always faster.

The eight chapters of this guide

Each chapter takes one question from this page and answers it in full, with the sources it rests on listed at the end.

What AI slop is: The meaning of the word, the forms slop takes on a business website, and the four qualities Google asks its raters to look for when they judge a page.
What Google says: Five Google documents set the rules for pages written with AI. This chapter quotes each one, says what it asks a business to do, and lists the questions Google tells site owners to ask themselves.
Signs of AI writing: Wikipedia's editors keep a long, public list of the habits that give machine-written text away. This chapter takes the ones that appear most on business websites and shows how to rewrite each one.
The editing process: Eight steps, in the order they work best, with what to do at each one and the checklist to keep next to the screen. Most of the work happens before the chatbot writes a word.
First-hand experience: Google asks its raters to look for first-hand experience, and readers trust it more than anything else on a page. This chapter explains what counts, and how a busy business can collect it every week.
Checking facts: AI tools produce wrong facts that look exactly like right ones. This chapter explains why, what it has cost others, and the method that catches the errors before a customer does.
Bylines and disclosure: Google's "Who, How, and Why" questions, the rules for online shops and reviews, what the EU AI Act says about AI text, and plain wording a business can put on its pages.
Publishing at scale: AI makes it possible to publish a hundred pages in a day. This chapter explains where Google draws the line, how location and service pages cross it, and how to plan a steady pace with a reason for every page.

Questions people ask

What does AI slop mean?: AI slop means low-quality content produced in quantity with artificial intelligence. Merriam-Webster named "slop" its 2025 word of the year and, as the Associated Press reported, defined it as "digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence." On a business website it usually means pages copied from a chatbot without checking, editing or adding anything the business knows.
Does Google penalise content written with AI?: Google does not penalise content because AI helped write it. Its February 2023 guidance says it rewards "high-quality content, however it is produced." Google does act against using AI, or any method, to produce many pages without value for readers. Its spam policies call this scaled content abuse, and since March 2024 the policy applies whether automation, people or both made the pages.
Can I still use ChatGPT to write my blog posts?: Yes. Google's guidance says generative AI "can be particularly useful when researching a topic, and to add structure to original content." The condition is what happens after the draft: a person checks every fact against its source, adds details from the business's own work, removes the habits readers recognise as machine writing, and decides whether the post helps a customer at all.
How can I tell if a page on my site is slop?: Read it aloud and ask three questions. Does it contain a fact, a photo or an example that only your business could give? Has someone checked every number and rule in it against a source? Would a customer who read it know something useful they did not know before? A page that fails all three is slop, whoever or whatever wrote it.
What happens if a chatbot on my website gives wrong information?: Your business is responsible for it. In Moffatt v. Air Canada, decided in February 2024, a British Columbia tribunal ordered Air Canada to pay $812.02 after its website chatbot described a fare rule that did not exist. The tribunal wrote that it makes no difference whether information comes from a static page or a chatbot. The same applies to blog posts written by AI.
Do AI detection tools prove that a page was written by AI?: No. Wikipedia's guide to signs of AI writing warns editors not to rely only on detection tools such as GPTZero and Pangram, because they "have non-trivial error rates" and can be fooled by small changes to the text. Google judges pages on quality and value. A page that helps readers is in a good position whatever a detector says about it.
How long does it take to edit an AI draft properly?: It depends on the page, and we have not measured a figure we can quote for every case. The steps are fixed: a fact check against each source, adding first-hand details, removing the writing habits from chapter 3, and reading the page aloud. A short post with three facts takes less time than a guide with twenty, so plan the time around the number of facts to check.
Is AI slop only a problem for search rankings?: No. Search is one cost. Readers who meet empty or wrong pages trust the business less, and wrong facts can bring legal costs, as the Air Canada and Mata v. Avianca cases show. A New York judge fined two lawyers and their firm $5,000 in June 2023 for filing court decisions that ChatGPT had invented and nobody had checked.
Which page should I fix first?: Start with the pages that already bring visitors from Google, because those are the pages customers read. Google Search Console, a free tool, lists them. Read the top 10 aloud, check every fact against its source, and add one detail from your own work to each. New pages can wait until the pages that already work are in good shape.
Where do the facts in this guide come from?: Every figure and quotation in this guide comes from a source opened on 4 November 2026: Google's own documentation and guidelines, Wikipedia's guide to signs of AI writing, court decisions, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission rule on reviews, the EU AI Act and the Associated Press. Each chapter lists the sources it used, with their dates, at the end of the page.

Sources

Merriam-Webster's 2025 word of the year is 'slop.' Here's why, The Associated Press. Published 15 December 2025, accessed 4 November 2026.
Google Search's guidance about AI-generated content, Google Search Central Blog. Published 8 February 2023, accessed 4 November 2026.
Spam policies for Google web search: scaled content abuse, Google Search Central. Last updated 2026-08-28, accessed 4 November 2026.
Google Search's guidance on using generative AI content on your website, Google Search Central. Last updated 2026-10-01, accessed 4 November 2026.
Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content, Google Search Central. Last updated 2026-10-05, accessed 4 November 2026.
Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines, Google. Version of 11 September 2025, accessed 4 November 2026.
New ways we're tackling spammy, low-quality content on Search, Google, The Keyword. Published 5 March 2024, updated 26 April 2024, accessed 4 November 2026.
Wikipedia:Signs of AI writing, Wikipedia, WikiProject AI Cleanup. Last edited 4 November 2026, accessed 4 November 2026.
Moffatt v. Air Canada, 2024 BCCRT 149, Civil Resolution Tribunal of British Columbia. Issued 14 February 2024, accessed 4 November 2026.
Mata v. Avianca, Inc., Opinion and Order on Sanctions, 22-cv-1461 (PKC), U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Filed 22 June 2023, accessed 4 November 2026.

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