Does It Matter Who Wrote the Page

What was actually published

Google set out its position on machine-written content in February, and it is short.

The substance is that using these tools is not itself against the guidelines, and that the assessment is about the quality and usefulness of what is published rather than about how it was produced.

What is discouraged is the same thing that has always been discouraged: producing content primarily to rank rather than to help somebody.

Which is a narrower statement than either side of this argument has been making since.

What that does and does not mean

• Not a penalty for using the tools.
• Not permission to publish anything.
• Not a change to how quality is assessed.
• Not a promise that it will not change.
• Not detection as the mechanism.

The last is worth understanding. The stated approach is to assess pages on quality rather than to identify how they were made, which is both more practical and more durable than trying to detect authorship.

The test has not moved

Which is the useful conclusion.

The question applied to any page is whether somebody arriving on it gets what they needed.

A machine-drafted page containing your prices, your timescales, and your examples passes that.

A hand-written page saying nothing specific fails it, and always has.

So the production method is not the variable, which means the effort belongs in what the page contains rather than in how it was produced.

That has been the answer for several years and the tools have not changed it.

Detection tools are not reliable

Worth addressing, since businesses are being sold on this anxiety.

Tools claiming to identify machine-written text produce both false positives and false negatives at rates that make them unusable for any decision.

They regularly flag human writing as generated, particularly writing that is plain and well structured.

No search engine has said it uses such detection as a ranking input.

So a supplier telling you that your pages will be identified and penalised is describing a mechanism nobody has claimed to operate.

The real risk is publishing thin pages, which is measurable and is what the guidance actually addresses.

A worked example

A business was told by a supplier that pages drafted with these tools would be penalised and offered a service to rewrite them.

Reading the published guidance took ten minutes and said the opposite of what they had been told.

What their pages actually needed was specifics: no prices, no timescales, and nothing that could not have been written about any competitor.

They spent the money on getting prices and photographs onto the pages instead.

Those pages now rank better than they did, which was never a question of who typed them.

Reading the source rather than the commentary is what made the difference.

Say who wrote it anyway

Since attribution earns its place for reasons that have nothing to do with this.

A page with a named author, a photograph, and a line about their experience is more persuasive to a reader, which is the reason to do it.

It also matters more in subjects where expertise is the point: anything touching health, money, safety, or a regulated trade.

That is a longstanding position and it applies whether or not a tool was involved in the drafting.

Attributing a page to somebody who did not write it is a different matter and is not something to do.

Where a page was drafted with a tool and edited by a named person who stands behind the content, attributing it to them is accurate.

Read the source, not the summaries

A general point this illustrates well.

Guidance of this kind is short, published openly, and written plainly.

Almost everything written about it is longer, less accurate, and produced by somebody selling a response to it.

Ten minutes reading the original leaves you better informed than an hour of commentary, and lets you evaluate the next supplier who calls.

Bookmark the search guidance and check it when something is claimed rather than accepting the summary.

What could still change

Since a published position is not a permanent one.

The volume of machine-produced content is rising quickly and the response to it may sharpen.

The reasonable expectation is that quality thresholds tighten rather than that a production method is banned.

Which means the protective strategy is the same either way: fewer pages, more specifics, and things that could only have come from you.

A business doing that has nothing to unwind if the position changes.

Your customers have a view as well

Worth separating, since the search question has crowded it out.

What a search engine rewards and what a reader feels about a page are different questions, and only one of them is being discussed this month.

Customers in some trades will care that the advice they are reading came from a person who does the work, particularly where the decision is expensive or the subject is one they are anxious about.

That is a reason to write the important pages yourself which has nothing to do with rankings and does not depend on anybody detecting anything.

Ask which of your pages a customer would be disappointed to learn was generated, and treat those as the ones to write by hand.

The counter-case

Guidance and behaviour are not identical.

What is stated as policy and what the systems actually reward can differ, and businesses have been caught out relying on the stated version before.

The volume of generated content also creates pressure that may produce a sharper response than the current wording implies.

And in some sectors the expectation of human authorship is a customer expectation regardless of any search consideration.

Read the published guidance, ignore detection claims, attribute pages honestly, and spend the effort on specifics.

What to do

1. Read the guidance yourself.
2. Ignore detection tool claims.
3. Ask whether the page helps somebody.
4. Add specifics rather than rewriting.
5. Name a real author.
6. Never attribute falsely.
7. Check the source when told otherwise.

Step one takes ten minutes and puts you ahead of most of what is being said about this, including by people selling services against it.

Why attribution matters anyway is covered in who wrote this and why should I believe them.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.