Google’s new AI tool touts creating optimized content in a scalable way

A recent Google blog post announced the expansion of Opal, a Google tool that uses AI to get people create mini apps, and touted that the tool can be used to create “optimized” content in a “scalable way.” Many SEOs are asking if this is against Google search guidelines, specifically the scaled content abuse policy.

What Google wrote. Google wrote on the Google blog about reasons one should use Opal:

• “Creators and marketers have also quickly adopted Opal to help them create custom content in a consistent, scalable way.”
• “Marketing asset generators: Tools that take a single product concept and instantly generate optimized blog posts, social media captions and video ad scripts.”

Scaled content abuse policy. Meanwhile, the scaled content abuse policy states:

“Scaled content abuse is when many pages are generated for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings and not helping users. This abusive practice is typically focused on creating large amounts of unoriginal content that provides little to no value to users, no matter how it’s created.”

The examples Google provided include:

“Using generative AI tools or other similar tools to generate many pages without adding value for users.”

Is this against Google’s policies. So the big question is, what Google promoted on its blog as a reason to use Opal is actually against Google’s policies. Google can argue that as long as your “primary purpose” is not “of manipulating search rankings” and it is to help users, than it is fine to use Opal or any other AI tool.

In fact, Reddit talked about how it was using AI tools to translate its pages at scale and it turned out, Google was okay with it.

SEOs not happy. Many SEOs feel these are double-standards and think Google should take a strong stance on using AI to generate content. Here are some of the complaints I posted from the community:

Why we care. Everyone is talking about “AI slop” and how it can ruin the web. When it comes to Google Search, Google has said it has algorithms to reward content that is helpful to users and that AI is not necessarily a bad thing.

Ultimately, if you are going to be using an AI tool, like Opal, to help you create content, you should use it as a tool and let it help you but don’t let it do it for you, fully automated, without oversight and at incredible scale.

Be careful with these tools.

I should note, we reached out to Google for a statement but we have not heard back yet. If we do, we will update the story with that statement.