Study Finds No Evidence Google Penalizes AI Content (www.searchenginejournal.com)

Ahrefs analyzed 600,000 URLs (the top 20 results for 100,000 random keywords) using its built-in AI content detector and found no evidence that Google either rewards or penalizes AI-generated content. The study’s headline metric — a correlation of just 0.011 between AI usage proportion and ranking position — indicates essentially no relationship between how much AI was used on a page and how highly it ranks. This reinforces Google’s public stance that search rankings are based on quality and usefulness, not on whether content was produced with generative tools. The dataset shows AI is already pervasive in high-ranking pages: 4.6% were classified as fully AI-generated, 13.5% purely human, and 81.9% a mix. Mixed pages skew toward moderate AI assistance (40% of pages had 11–40% AI), with smaller shares in minimal (1–10%, 13.8%), substantial (41–70%, 20.3%) and dominant (71–99%, 7.8%) categories. While fully AI pages do appear in top-20 results, they rarely claim #1; pages with ≤30% AI showed a slight edge in top positions, suggesting human oversight and editorial quality still matter. For content creators, the takeaway is practical: AI is a tool, not an inherent ranking risk — focus on helpful, well-edited content rather than the provenance of its writing.