AI content impacts SEO based on quality, not origin. Google's official stance since 2023 is that they don't penalize content for being AI-generated. Their algorithms evaluate helpfulness, expertise, and user satisfaction regardless of whether a human or machine wrote the first draft. If your AI content answers the query better than competitors, provides original insight, and keeps users engaged, it can rank perfectly well. The real risk is that most raw AI output is generic. Language models trained on average internet text produce average results by default. They hallucinate facts, repeat common phrasing across millions of sites, and lack the specific experience that makes content genuinely useful. Publishing unedited AI content at scale usually means thin pages that don't satisfy search intent, which absolutely tanks SEO. At Ottawa SEO, we use AI as a drafting tool, not a publish button. A writer or subject expert always verifies facts, adds specific examples the model can't know, and rewrites sections that sound like every other AI article on page two of Google. The goal is content that a reader would cite or link to, which means it needs accuracy and perspective that pure generation doesn't provide. Three things determine whether AI content helps or hurts your SEO: - Factual accuracy: AI invents statistics and misattributes sources constantly. One false claim can destroy trust and trigger manual review. - Originality of insight: Rewording existing articles in slightly different ways creates zero value. You need angles, data, or expertise competitors don't have. - User engagement: If visitors bounce back to Google in 10 seconds, that page will drop regardless of how it was written. The practical approach is to treat AI like an intern who writes decent rough drafts but needs supervision. Use it to scale research and structure, then apply human expertise to make the content actually useful. Sites that do this are ranking fine. Sites that spam raw ChatGPT output are seeing the same fate as old-school content farms.