Does Google Detect AI Content in Blog Posts
The question every content creator is asking right now: can Google actually tell if your blog post was written by an AI? The answer is more nuanced than most SEO gurus want to admit.
What We Know So Far!
Google has been deliberately vague about its AI detection capabilities. In official statements, the company says it focuses on content quality rather than origin. But behavior in the SERPs tells a different story.
After the December 2025 core update, sites relying on mass-produced AI content saw dramatic drops. Some lost 80% or more of their organic traffic overnight. But was that because Google detected the content as AI-generated, or because the content was simply low quality?
Detection vs Quality Signals
There is an important distinction here. Google could be doing one of three things:
- Actively detecting AI content and penalizing it
- Detecting AI content but only penalizing low-quality instances
- Not detecting AI at all, just enforcing quality standards that AI content often fails
Each of these scenarios requires a completely different response from content creators. And right now, we do not have definitive proof of which one is true.
The Evidence
Several studies have attempted to answer this question. The Ahrefs analysis of 600,000 pages found almost zero correlation between AI usage and ranking position. But that study measured correlation across existing pages, not causation on controlled test sites.
What we need is a proper controlled experiment with matched content across fresh domains. That is exactly what we are working on here at RankNotes.
What This Means for You
Until we have better data, the safest approach is to use AI as a drafting tool rather than a publishing tool. Edit heavily. Add your own expertise. Make the content yours.
The sites that survived the December update were not the ones that avoided AI entirely. They were the ones that used AI intelligently, with human oversight and genuine expertise layered on top.