The ad finds me every few days now. The company name changes, the promise never does: hundreds of SEO-optimized articles for your business, every month, written and published while you sleep. Link your website. Upload your logo. Done. Zero effort required, and the comment section fills with small business owners tagging their partners.
I want to be very clear about what is for sale here, because the ad copy is exact in its own way. Nobody promises readers. Nobody promises customers, or even rankings, once you read closely. The product is articles by the hundred, plus the effort you are spared. Sleep is the feature. Your absence from your own company's voice is the feature.
What the money buys
I have watched this play out from the client side more times than I can comfortably count. A company signs up, pays a few hundred dollars a month, and the blog begins to fill. The articles are grammatical. They are formatted. They have the confident rhythm of text that has never met a fact it could not generalise. And they are interchangeable to a degree that should alarm anyone who reads two of them: swap the logo and they would sit just as happily on a competitor's site, because nothing in them ever came from inside the company. No customer stories, no opinions, no scars. Then the traction fails to arrive. No readers, no citations, no movement, sometimes a quiet slide backwards. Eventually the owner says the sentence I have now heard, in almost the same words, from different people:
But we've posted hundreds of articles. Why isn't it working?
It is a painful question, because the person asking did everything the ad told them to do. They paid on time. They linked the website. They slept. Nobody told them the volume they bought was the problem itself.
Google never asks the question the ads keep answering
The pitch leans, quietly, on fear: the suspicion that Google punishes AI content, paired with the promise that this particular AI content will slip through. Google has been unusually plain on the subject. Its guidance, published in February 2023 and unchanged in substance since, says the search engine rewards high-quality content "however it is produced." The phrase "written by AI" appears nowhere in its lists of what gets a page demoted. Usefulness appears on every one of them.
The data agrees with the policy. Ahrefs analysed 600,000 pages and found that 86.5 percent of top-ranking pages contain at least some AI-generated content. The correlation they measured between AI use and ranking position came out at 0.011, which is a statistician's way of writing none. If a machine touching your text got you punished, the top of Google would be a ghost town.
What does get punished has a name, and the name reads like a description of the ads in my feed. Google's spam policies include scaled content abuse: generating many pages primarily to manipulate rankings rather than to help people. Machines are never mentioned. Content mills full of underpaid humans ran the same scheme for a decade before the models arrived, and Google swatted them the same way. The policy describes a business model, and the business model is the one currently being advertised to you as a subscription, per month, cancel anytime.
The newer machines are stricter still. When an answer engineAnswer Engine: A tool that responds to a question with a direct answer instead of a list of links to click — like ChatGPT, Perplexity, or the AI summaries now sitting at the top of Google. Read the full entry in the glossary.Answer EngineA tool that responds to a question with a direct answer instead of a list of links to click — like ChatGPT, Perplexity, or the AI summaries now sitting at the top of Google.Read full entry decides which page to cite, it looks for something the rest of the web has not already saidInformation Gain: How much a page adds that is not already said everywhere else — the measure of whether a machine has any reason to read it rather than the twenty pages saying the same thing. Read the full entry in the glossary.Information GainHow much a page adds that is not already said everywhere else — the measure of whether a machine has any reason to read it rather than the twenty pages saying the same thing.Read full entry, said by someone identifiable, plainly enough to quote. A thousand articles containing nothing are, to these systems, a thousand confirmations that your site contains nothing. Scale does not dilute that signal. Scale is that signal.
How often the machines name youAI Visibility: AI visibility is how often, and how accurately, AI assistants name your business when someone asks them a question you could have answered. Read the full entry in the glossary.AI VisibilityAI visibility is how often, and how accurately, AI assistants name your business when someone asks them a question you could have answered.Read full entry is decided inside your pages, never by counting them.
Made with AI, wide awake
Now the disclosure, which is also the argument. I build AI tooling for a living, I use AI in nearly everything I produce, and this article was drafted in collaboration with one. On paper, I am exactly the sort of person those agencies would love to have nodding along. And I started the way everyone starts: amazed, automating whatever sat still long enough. What I learned quickly is that anything I generated without putting my own expertise and voice into it read like nothing and did nothing. The words were fine. There was nobody home.
So I changed how I work instead of abandoning the tools. I stopped issuing an instruction and closing the laptop. These days the AI and I work the way a writer works with an editor: it asks me questions, I answer, it digs where I gloss over things, and it drags experiences out of me that I would never have thought to write down. This piece began exactly that way, with the machine interviewing me about why those ads make me angry. The machine typed plenty of it. Every opinion in it had to be extracted from a person.
There is a name for what that process puts into a text. Google's quality guidelines call it E-E-A-TE-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness — the shorthand for whether whoever wrote a page has any standing to say what they are saying. Read the full entry in the glossary.E-E-A-TExperience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness — the shorthand for whether whoever wrote a page has any standing to say what they are saying.Read full entry: experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness. Read those four words again and notice that every one of them is something a supplier cannot generate on your behalf. Experience means you were there. Expertise means you know what only practice teaches. Authority means others point to you. Trust is the compound interest on the first three. An agency that requires nothing from you except a logo has told you, in its own onboarding flow, that none of the four will be present.
The letters are measurable, too. One vendor tracked fifty thousand AI-assisted articles across two thousand sites and found that content published on strong E-E-A-T profiles reached the top ten at four times the rate of the same kind of content on weak ones. Both indexed fine. The gap opened where it always opens, at the moment a machine has to decide whom to believe.
You cannot outsource being trusted.
Milking it while it lasts
Do the agencies know what they are selling? A few, I am sure, are true believers who mistook output for progress. Most of them, I think, know precisely. Slop is a wonderful product from the seller's side: the marginal cost sits near zero, the client cannot judge quality in a field they came to you to understand, and by the time the damage shows up in the numbers, the invoices have long since cleared. My honest prediction is that they will milk this for as long as business owners remain illiterate about how ranking and citation actually work, then pivot, seamlessly, into selling the cleanup. Some have already relabelled the identical service as answer engine optimizationAnswer Engine Optimization (AEO): Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring your content so an AI or search engine can lift a clear, direct answer from it and show it to the person asking. Read the full entry in the glossary.Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring your content so an AI or search engine can lift a clear, direct answer from it and show it to the person asking.Read full entry, which at least proves somebody there reads the news.
My own test for publishing anything, with AI or without, fits in a sentence. A reader is about to hand me minutes of their life, and the question is whether they leave with an advantage they did not arrive with. If yes, publish, and nobody will ever ask what typed the first draft. If no, no quantity of it will add up to anything, because zero multiplied by hundreds is a calculation these agencies are counting on you never doing.
The ads will keep finding me, and I have stopped arguing in the comment sections. But if you are the one tagging a business partner under one of them, allow me one small correction to the pitch before you pay. Your customers are not asleep. That is the flaw in publishing while you sleep: everyone who matters is awake when they read it.
Sources
AI-Generated Content Does Not Hurt Your Google Rankings (600,000 Pages Analyzed) — Ahrefs
Google Search's guidance about AI-generated content — Google Search Central Blog