Google Says Doubling Down On AI Content Now May Be A Bad Idea

There is a thread on Reddit asking site owners how they are dealing with the new various Google updates and the associated traffic drops. One Redditor responded that he would go from 500 articles to 5,000 articles written using AI to make up for the traffic drop. In which Google’s John Mueller responded, “this is a bad idea.”

John Mueller added, “Instead of digging deeper, I’d look around for ways to build something up.” He even added that “maybe that means discarding the site and building up something for the long run.”

Here is the original post:

I’m just gonna post more content to make up for my lost traffic.

So currently with 500 articles I am getting 200 hits a day. I used to get 2,000.

So now I’m going to write 5,000 articles (using AI, of course), and hopefully get back 2000 hits a day.

It sounds stupid, but it’s the only thing I can think of.

Here is John Mueller’s full response:

I hope you’re making a joke, because this is a bad idea. Instead of digging deeper, I’d look around for ways to build something up. Maybe that means discarding the site and building up something for the long run.

The Redditor then responded to the comment about starting a new site, saying, “You say that very casually. As if writing 500 articles was easy and their original goal wasn’t a long term play. Of course there’s a caveat: I don’t know their site.”

Truth is, right now, it is too soon to really do anything. You will have different spam updates and core updates, various systems within each ranking system, dueling with each other. Let it settle and let’s see what happens.

As a reminder, Google launched the March 2024 core update and March 2024 spam update on March 5th, along with new spam policies that resulted in many manual actions. We saw some movement from the core update this past Friday and Saturday but it seemed to calm down Sunday through today.

We still have a few more weeks of volatility with these updates. So it might be too early to plan unless you know you are really generating poor-quality content, then you know you can do better.

Forum discussion at Reddit.