Google Adsense Rejects a Site Due to AI Content

If you publish AI generated content on a site will Google identify it and punish it? Will it limit your ability to monetize the site? 

Recently we have seen multiple sites getting rejected by AdSense because they had “automatically generated content” and upon further investigation it was clear that AI content was to blame. 

This post looks at one such case and if you have been rejected from AdSense because of “automatically generated content” this post shows you how to overcome that problem.

‍Google Search and AI Content: 

This article looks at AI generated content and Google Adsense but not the potential impact AI generated content will have on your site's ability to rank. Have a look at these articles if you are interested in ranking AI generated content: 

• Our own study showed that there was a correlation between the Originality.AI score and google rankings - Will Google Penalize AI Content
• Case study showing AI content performing not as well as human written content - https://www.rebootonline.com/blog/ai-vs-humans-content-writing-seo-experiment/
• Google's stance on AI content is that essentially automatically generated content (AI or other) that is created for the purposes of manipulating search results is bad. 

Adsense Rejection Email Due to AI Content

In May 2023 a website owner applied to have their site on Google Adsense. However, upon their application, they received this email from Google! 

Email: 

Upon investigating further, these were the reasons they were given for the possible rejection: 

Investigating even further into the “ Make sure your site has unique high quality content and a good user experience” point, the website owner found these additional reasons. 

Google Adsense and AI Content - Investigation and Analysis

The site owner wanted to dig in more to understand was it Plagiarism, Low Quality Content or was AI generated content the culprit? 

To identify potential issues with the content, at Originlity.AI we helped analyze the top 10 articles on the website. Since the site had over 700 articles with traffic distributed across them, focusing on the top 10 articles provided a good sample for our investigation. 

First we read the articles to get the user experience with no bias. The articles were better than we had expected given the rejection. They were all upwards of 1000 words, they had introductions, several paragraphs and were all wrapped up nicely with a conclusion. They had internal links and external links. They were formatted well, had good grammar and spelling and were actually useful. 

The type of content you would expect from ChatGPT4 with good prompt and some human editing.

Second, we checked for plagiarism which is usually a huge culprit with these things. Using the Originliaty.AI Plagiarism tool, we didn't see any large scale plagiarism issues.  There are a few minor matches for plagiarism (a few lines here and there) but it wasn’t enough of a match to get a website rejected from Adsense. Usually if a website gets penalised for plagiarism, they are copying entire articles from other websites. Plagiarism wasn't a concern from our perspective.  

Next, we ran these 10 articles through the Originality.AI for AI Detection. This is when things became clearer to us, 7 of the 10 articles came back as 100% AI. 

The articles flagged by Originality.AI’s AI detection tool had likely been created using AI tools such as ChatGPT. 

Further investigation was done and all content on the site that was identified as AI by Originality was either unpublished or edited. 

Adsense Rejection Reversal by Editing or Unpublishing AI Content:

Once all content that was identified as AI by Originality.ai had been edited or unpublished the site reapplied to AdSense and was immediately accepted. 

Editing/unpublishing the content identified as AI by Originality was the ONLY modification to the site that was made, making it very evident that AI Generated content was in fact the reason for this website’s initial rejection. 

Final Thoughts on Adsense’s Stance on AI Generated Content: 

This case highlights the potential challenges associated with AI-generated content when applying for advertising platforms such as Google Adsense. 

It also adds further uncertainty to how Google Search treats AI content if Google clearly has the ability to detect AI generated content. 

At Originality.AI we are not against the use of AI generated content but website owners should know the risks associated with using this type of content.