How to Tell If Content Was Written by AI

ChatGPT launched in November 2022. By January 2023, it had 100 million users. By 2025, AI-generated content is everywhere — blog posts, product descriptions, social media, even news articles.

The question isn't whether AI content exists on the web. It's whether you can tell the difference. And whether Google can.

Here's what actually works for detecting AI content, what doesn't, and why it matters for your website.

Why AI Detection Matters for SEO

Google's official stance: AI content isn't automatically bad. Their guidelines focus on "helpful content" regardless of how it was made. But there's a big caveat.

Google's Helpful Content Update specifically targets content that feels mass-produced, thin, or written to game search engines rather than help users. Most unedited AI content fits that description perfectly.

The risk isn't that Google detects AI and penalizes you. The risk is that AI-generated content tends to be generic, repetitive, and surface-level — exactly the kind of content Google's algorithms are built to filter out.

Signs Content Was Written by AI

After reading thousands of AI-generated articles, patterns emerge. Here's what to look for:

Overly smooth, uniform sentence structure

Human writing is messy. We start sentences with "But." We use fragments. Sometimes we ramble. AI text tends to have a consistent rhythm — medium-length sentences, similar structure, no rough edges.

Compare these two paragraphs:

AI-like: "Search engine optimization is a crucial aspect of digital marketing. It involves optimizing your website to rank higher in search engine results pages. By implementing effective SEO strategies, you can increase your organic traffic and improve your online visibility."

Human-like: "SEO is how you get Google to show your site to people. It's not magic — it's fixing your title tags, writing useful content, and making your site load fast. Boring? Maybe. But it works."

The first one says nothing specific. The second one has personality and gives you something concrete.

Filler phrases and hedging

AI loves to hedge. Watch for phrases like:

• "It's important to note that..."
• "In today's digital landscape..."
• "There are several factors to consider..."
• "This can vary depending on..."
• "It's worth mentioning that..."

These phrases add word count without adding information. Human experts don't pad their writing this way — they just say the thing.

Lack of specific examples

Ask an AI about improving page speed and you get "optimize your images and minimize JavaScript." Ask a human and you might get "I switched from PNG to WebP on our product images and LCP went from 4.2s to 1.8s."

AI gives general advice. Humans give specific stories. If an article talks about SEO without mentioning a single real URL, tool, or metric, it's probably AI.

Overuse of certain words

AI models have vocabulary preferences. These words appear disproportionately in AI text:

• Comprehensive
• Leverage
• Streamline
• Delve
• Cutting-edge
• Seamless
• Robust
• Utilize (instead of "use")
• Landscape (as in "the digital landscape")

One of these in an article? Normal. Five or more? Red flag.

Perfect structure, no personality

AI-generated articles often have textbook-perfect structure: intro paragraph, three to five main sections with subheadings, a conclusion that restates the intro. It reads like an essay template.

Real articles have personality. The writer might go on a tangent, crack a joke, express frustration, or skip a section entirely because it's not worth covering.

AI Detection Tools: What Works and What Doesn't

Several tools claim to detect AI content. Here's the honest truth about them.

Tools that exist

• GPTZero — One of the earliest. Measures "perplexity" (how predictable the text is) and "burstiness" (variation in sentence complexity). Works okay on pure, unedited ChatGPT output. Less reliable on edited text.
• Originality.ai — Paid tool popular with content agencies. Claims high accuracy but has notable false positive rates, especially with non-native English writers.
• Copyleaks — Enterprise-focused. Better at detecting patterns across large volumes of text.
• AuditMySite AI Checker — Our free AI content checker analyzes text patterns and gives you a probability score. Useful for a quick gut check on your own content.

The accuracy problem

No AI detector is 100% accurate. Period. Here's why:

• False positives are common — The US Constitution, academic papers, and non-native English writing frequently get flagged as AI-generated. OpenAI themselves shut down their own AI detector because accuracy was too low.
• Paraphrasing beats detection — Running AI text through a paraphrasing tool (or just editing it by hand) makes it nearly undetectable. The more human editing, the harder it is to detect.
• Models keep improving — GPT-4's output is harder to detect than GPT-3.5's. Each new model gets more human-like.

What Google Actually Does About AI Content

Google doesn't have a public "AI content penalty." What they do have:

• Helpful Content System — Algorithmically evaluates whether content is written for humans or for search engines. Unedited AI content often fails this test because it's generic and doesn't add unique value.
• SpamBrain — Google's AI-powered spam detection. Targets scaled content abuse — sites publishing hundreds or thousands of AI articles with no editorial oversight.
• Manual actions — Google's spam team can and does manually penalize sites that use AI to mass-produce low-quality content.

The takeaway: one well-edited AI-assisted article probably won't hurt you. Fifty unedited ones probably will.

How to Use AI Content Without Getting Burned

AI is a tool. Like any tool, the output depends on how you use it.

• Use AI for drafts, not final copy — Let it generate a first draft, then rewrite it in your voice with your expertise and specific examples.
• Add original insights — Share your experience, data, or opinions. AI can't do this because it doesn't have your experience.
• Include specific examples — Real URLs, real numbers, real screenshots. This is impossible for AI to fabricate convincingly.
• Edit aggressively — Remove every phrase that sounds generic. If you could swap your brand name with any competitor and the sentence still works, it's too generic.
• Run your content through a detector — Not because detectors are perfect, but because if it reads as AI to a tool, it probably reads as AI to humans too. Try our AI content checker for a quick assessment.

The Real Test

Forget about AI detectors for a second. Here's the real test: read the content out loud.

Does it sound like something a knowledgeable person would actually say? Or does it sound like a Wikipedia article that got run through a thesaurus?

If you wouldn't say it in a conversation, don't publish it on your website. That's true whether a human or an AI wrote it.

The best content in 2025 is AI-assisted, human-finished. Use the robots to handle the boring parts. Then add the stuff only you can add.