There has been a lot of pearl-clutching these last few years about AI’s threat to commoditize creativity. In 2023, Hollywood writers struck in part to ensure that AI-generated scripts wouldn’t replace them. Actors did the same so AI couldn’t be used to leverage their voices and images. But there’s little evidence it’s happening. Certainly, articles we’ve written that ranked well in search results before the advent of AI have been unaffected by it.

In the two years since ChatGPT was released to the public, the impact of AI on search has become clearer, and, despite apocalyptic fears that creatives will lose out to the machines, the news regarding search in the age of AI is good for humans who can produce high quality, original content. In fact, paradoxically or counterintuitively or whatever, AI is making original content more valuable than ever before.

Quality content has long been critical to the reputation and credibility of companies that sell B2B services, but only if customers can find it. Finding it has long been the job of search engines. For the last 20 years, that’s meant Google, which has a 90 percent share of U.S. and worldwide search. Google, therefore, is the single most powerful determinant of the content we encounter online.

How Google ranks content in its search results depends on its algorithms, which it updates several times a year to make sure that searchers get helpful and reliable results. So, we can understand how much competition AI-generated content is giving humans by looking at Google’s updates since ChatGPT was launched in late 2022.

Google periodically releases core updates, broad changes to improve the utility of its search algorithms and ensure that people see original, helpful content written by people for people. Since January 2023, Google has rolled out seven of these.

The August 2024 update explicitly promoted high-quality content while demoting low-value content designed not to inform but to attract search engine traffic.

The last core update was in November 2024, and the sleuths at Search Engine Journal (SEJ) found over the following month that e-commerce sites appeared about 20 percent less often in top citations on search engine results pages, while the frequency of B2B technology results, for instance, was unchanged – anecdotal evidence that Google’s preference for helpful content has produced results that favor original content which, by the way, AI still cannot (and may never) provide.

Google also releases targeted updates to tackle “black hat” or nefarious search engine optimization techniques, and undesirable content. Its May 2024 Site Reputation Abuse update targeted marketers piggybacking promotional content (positive product reviews, for instance) on other sites with better search rankings while those better-ranked sites pretended not to notice. For those cases, Google downgraded both parties – the piggybackers and the piggybacked – manually at first, then algorithmically, and delisted some altogether.

A week later, Google started featuringArtificial Intelligence Overviews (AIOs) at the top of search results. They are created by Google’s Gemini AI bot and include links to their source articles. They appear when Google determines that you want to understand information quickly from a range of sources from across the web. They may also include information from Google’s Knowledge Graph, a cross between an encyclopedia and a database in which Google stores information like Elvis Presley’s birthday (associated, of course, with “The King”).

According to the folks at SEJ, sites that rank well in organic search are increasingly being cited in AIOs with links to their content.

All of this is good news for people who create high-quality, original content.

Two years ago, just before ChatGPT launched, we worked with clients on an article about the future of biopharma operations. That article still appears at the top of the organic search results for the keywords “biopharma operations,” despite whatever anyone might have written since with AI. And it’s linked in the AIO above that.

Google’s core algorithms continually demote AI pap while promoting content made by people trying to help and inform other people so that good content – human-made content – can shine. AI is one tool that Google uses to identify unoriginal and low-quality content. And Google’s Gemini AI bot gives quality content another way to stand out at the top of the search engine results pages without its creators needing to make any extra effort.

In other words, AI, thanks to the Google goliath, is helping people who develop original content and is not decreasing their value or stealing their jobs. Quite the contrary.

There have always been people who think they can make a fast buck the easy way, taking shortcuts, and those who generate content with AI are doing just that. But, so far, based on the available information and data, those grifters are losing out to people who take their time and give their content real thought. The grifters, it turns out, are wasting their time.