Google's position on AI-written content is narrower than most of the advice online suggests. It doesn't penalise text for being generated. It penalises text that exists to game search rather than to help the person reading it — which describes a great deal of generated content, but not because a machine wrote it.
That distinction is the whole game. AI is a genuinely good drafting tool and a genuinely bad publishing tool, and the gap between those two is where sites get hurt.
Draft with it, don't publish straight from it
Unedited AI copy has a texture people recognise now, even if they can't name it. Everything is balanced. Every paragraph hedges. Nothing has a point of view, and no sentence could only have been written by someone who does this work.
A visitor reads that and concludes — correctly — that nobody was really paying attention. On a page whose whole job is convincing a stranger to trust you with their house or their money, that's expensive.
Use it to get past a blank page, then rewrite it in your own words with your own examples. The specific detail that only you know is the part that does the work: the neighborhood where the pipes are always galvanised, the month your trade goes quiet, the question every customer asks that nobody expects.
Never let it invent facts
This is the one that does real, lasting damage. A made-up statistic, an invented certification, a "serving the community for over 20 years" on a business founded in 2022 — these get written confidently and read plausibly, and every one of them is a liability.
Customers check. Competitors check. And a single provable exaggeration costs you more trust than the sentence could ever have earned, because it recasts everything else on the page as possibly untrue.
The rule is simple: if you can't point at where a number came from, it doesn't go on the site. "Three clients and no measured results" is a perfectly respectable thing to say. An invented percentage is not.
Watch for duplicate content
The classic failure is location pages. Somebody generates twenty pages — "Plumber in Torrance," "Plumber in Gardena," "Plumber in Lawndale" — from one prompt with the city name swapped. They read identically because they are identical, and Google is good at recognising that pattern. The usual outcome isn't a dramatic penalty; it's that nineteen of them are quietly filtered out and never rank for anything.
Three city pages with something genuinely local on each — a job you did there, a landmark, a quirk of the housing stock — will beat twenty templated ones. If you can't write something true and specific about a city, that's a good sign the page shouldn't exist yet.
Keep a person on the legal pages
Privacy policies, terms, warranty language, pricing terms, anything touching licensing or insurance — these carry real liability if a detail is wrong, and AI gets details wrong in exactly the confident register that stops you checking.
The cost of an error here isn't a ranking drop. It's a dispute you can't win because your own website contradicts you.
Where it genuinely helps
None of this is an argument against the tool. Used honestly it's very good at: turning your rambling voice memo about a job into structured prose; suggesting the questions a page should answer; tightening writing you've already done; drafting the twelve product descriptions you were never going to write by hand.
The pattern that works is the same every time — you supply the facts and the judgement, it supplies the speed. Reverse those and you get a site that reads like everyone else's and can't be trusted on the details.