Is AI-Written Content Worth It For SEO?

A lot of clients have been asking if they will get in trouble with Google if they use AI to create content. The answer depends on what your definition of “bad” content is. Googlers have gone on record saying that content written with AI is not necessarily problematic for SEO, but bad content written with AI is, or something like that.

An entrepreneurial friend of mine jumped on the AI content train with gusto last year. He put together an editorial plan, created a prompt strategy and used a team in the Philippines to crank out over 1,000 AI articles, including AI images, on his site.

Here’s what happened to his organic Google traffic:

That downturn in December is not from a drop in rankings; he ranked for a lot of queries related to the November election.

Check out his page one keyword rankings:

Of course in SEO what goes up sometimes must come down. Let’s look at his Google traffic in 2025:

It looks like he is getting crushed, but if we look at the page one keyword rankings it seems like that is not necessarily the case (at least up until the June 2025 Core Update):

He’s still on page one for a ton of keywords, but unfortunately for him AI Overviews are taking over his SERPs:

And it looks like Google did deindex most of his AI articles:

But not all of them. These are his top 5’s YoY performance, all written with AI:

According to my friend, he’s made over $1M thanks to this strategy.

So will it be bad for SEO if you use AI to write your content? In this case, it certainly has been for the SEOs competing with him…