Red Isle WebSomewhere in the middle of a first phone call about a new site, the owner's voice usually drops a little and they tell me the writing on their current one came out of ChatGPT. They typed in what they do, pasted the answer onto the page, and it read fine.
Then a nephew or a Facebook post told them Google punishes AI writing, and now they are wondering whether the site is doing them harm.
Google does not penalize a website for being written with ChatGPT or any other AI tool. Google has said so in writing since 2023, and a study of 150,000 top-ranking pages this summer found fully AI-written pages sitting in the top three results. What Google filters out is copy that says nothing specific, and AI copy is usually exactly that.
What does Google say about AI writing?
Google put its position in writing in February 2023 and has not changed it since: how the words got made does not matter, and whether they help the person who searched is the only test. Using AI to write a page is allowed. Generating hundreds of thin pages to game search is against its spam rules, and in 2024 Google added a rule aimed squarely at sites doing that at scale. A five-page site for a roofing company in Stratford is nothing like the sites that rule was written for, which pump out hundreds of pages a week.
Does AI-written copy rank?
Ahrefs, a company that makes SEO tools (SEO being how likely your site is to show up when someone searches for what you do), ran 150,000 top-ranking pages through its AI detector in June and published the numbers in July. Of the pages holding the top three spots on Google, 5.3 percent were entirely AI-written and about 9 percent were mostly AI. So yes, AI copy can hold the top spot.
The same study also followed roughly 80,000 pages in Google Search Console over six months, and the mostly-human pages picked up two to three times the impressions of the mostly-AI pages. An impression is one appearance in someone's search results. There was no cliff where a penalty kicked in at month three; the AI-heavy pages simply got seen by fewer people, week after week.
Ryan Law, who wrote the study, concluded the AI pages were losing because the writing on them was worse, and worse writing gets less traffic whoever typed it.
Why does AI copy do worse, then?
Ask ChatGPT to write an About page for a plumber in Charlottetown and it will tell you the plumber is committed to quality workmanship and customer satisfaction, offers residential and commercial services, and has proudly served the community for years. Every plumber on the Island could paste that page onto their own site and nobody would notice the swap. Google notices. So does the person reading it.
The weak AI pages in that study repeated what every other page already said, and they carried nothing first-hand, the way a page reads when nobody who does the work has touched it.
A ChatGPT draft has never stood in a crawlspace in Cornwall in February. It does not know that you stopped taking commercial jobs in 2022, or that half your calls in April are about sump pumps. Those are the sentences that separate your page from the one three towns over, and the tool cannot write them for you.
"So do I need to throw out what ChatGPT wrote?"
Keep it, and treat it as a first draft that a stranger wrote. Read each paragraph and ask whether a competitor could paste it onto their own site unchanged, and if they could, that paragraph is doing nothing for you.
Replace it with something only you could have written, like which towns you drive to, or the job last fall that ran three days over and how you made it right. A photo of a job you finished last month does more for that page than any paragraph the tool can produce.
The good news
You already have all the material the tool was missing, because you have been doing the work for years, and getting it onto the page is mostly a matter of writing down what you tell customers on the phone anyway. A site with five specific pages will do more on Google than a site with twenty generic ones, and five pages is a manageable amount of writing. Nothing needs to come down in a panic. Edit the pages one at a time, starting with the home page and the one that describes the service you make most of your money on.
That's the kind of site I build here at Red Isle Web. I write the pages from a conversation with you, so they carry what you know instead of what a chatbot guesses, at a one-time price with no monthly fee, for Island businesses. If your current site reads like everyone else's, that's a fixable problem, and usually a smaller job than folks expect. Have a look at some of my work, or send me a note, and I'll read your site and tell you which pages are worth rewriting.