Google Clarifies: AI-Generated Images Don’t Trigger Ranking Penalties

Google Clarifies: AI-Generated Content Doesn’t Trigger Ranking Penalties

Today, Google’s Gary Illyes addressed a pressing concern among content creators: whether AI-generated images – can harm your SEO rankings. His answer was clear:

“No, no. So AI generated image doesn’t impact the SEO. Not direct. … you are not going to… see any negative impact from that. If anything, you might get some traffic out of image search…”

This reassures publishers that AI-generated visuals, when paired with legitimate and valuable content, won’t directly trigger ranking penalties—even potentially boosting traffic through Google Image Search (searchenginejournal.com).

What the Data Tells Us

Complementing Google’s stance, a large-scale analysis by Ahrefs of 600,000 web pages also found no correlation between AI-generated content and higher or lower rankings. In fact, AI usage was prevalent across top-ranking pages:

Approximately 82% of pages included both AI-generated and human-written content;
Minimal to substantial AI usage was common; and
The correlation between AI-use and ranking position was effectively zero (0.011), meaning AI neither helps nor hurts by itself (searchenginejournal.com).

But Quality Remains King

While the method of creation—AI or human—doesn’t inherently impact rankings, Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines emphasise content value above all. Pages dominated by AI-generated material without originality or added user value are rated at the lowest quality level (searchengineland.com).

SEO experts echo this position: Google doesn’t penalise AI content per se, but penalises low-effort, generic, or unhelpful content—regardless of how it was produced (seosherpa.com, searchatlas.com).