Ahrefs just dropped a massive report on AI-generated content and Google rankings. The takeaway? Google doesn’t care if your content is AI-made or not.
The study analyzed 600,000 webpages. They pulled the top 20 URLs for 100,000 random keywords using Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer. Then they ran AI detection on every page.
Here’s the breakdown: 
- 4.6% of pages were fully AI-generated
- 13.5% were purely human-written
- 81.9% mixed AI and human content
Among the mixed pages, AI usage ranged from minimal (1-10%) to dominant (71-99%). Most fell in the moderate range (11-40%).
The crucial stat? The correlation between AI content percentage and Google ranking was basically zero (0.011). In other words, AI content presence neither helps nor hurts your SEO.
Google’s stance? The search giant focuses on quality, not how the content was created.
“There is no clear relationship between how much AI-generated content a page has and how highly it ranks on Google. This suggests that Google neither significantly rewards nor penalizes pages just because they use AI.”
There’s a slight pattern: #1 ranked pages tend to have less AI content (0-30%). Fully AI-generated pages do hit the top 20, but rarely top #1 spots.
The report’s final word: combine AI tools with human input for best results. Pure AI content alone struggles to crack the top spot.
“Google probably doesn’t care how you made the content. It simply cares whether searchers find it helpful.”
Ahrefs compares this to steel manufacturing after nuclear exposure: soon no content will be untouched by AI.
Bottom line: use AI freely but keep humans in the loop. Google rewards value, not the method behind it.
