Google's John Mueller and Martin Splitt spoke about the Google Search Console indexing report in its latest Search Off the Record podcast. One item was on how quality issues, including low-quality AI-generated content, can result in those pages not being trusted and not being indexed by Google. That might lead to the page indexing report showing a "crawled - currently not indexed" status, in some cases.
He is not outright saying AI-generated content is bad, but if you read it and it screams AI-generated, then that might be a bad thing. If it reads that anyone could have wrote it, that there is nothing new and unique - then why would Google decide to index the page. That can lead to site quality issues and thus indexing issues. This is not a new topic, we covered it countless times.
Martin Splitt asked John Mueller:
And if we haven't visited them, we can't put them in the index versus "crawled - currently not indexed," which means we visited them and we didn't put them in the index, and that can have all sorts of different reasons. Would you say that that is often or only sometimes a sign of a quality issue?
John Mueller answered:
Sometimes. So it's definitely the case if our systems are seriously worried about the quality of a website, that they will reduce the number of pages that they index. Because if we—if we have strong concerns about the overall quality, then it doesn't make much sense for our systems to spend a lot of time on the website. So we'll probably crawl a lot less, we'll index a lot less. And then you'll see things like "crawled not indexed" or "discovered not indexed." Which from our point of view is basically our system saying we know about this. And once we're happy—we looked at it—once we're happy, we will take another look and see if we can index it. It's not so much that I would say you should take these situations and try to fix them.Like from a technical point of view. It's not that you need to fix this technical issue that Google is not indexing this page at the moment. But rather, you almost need to, when you recognize a bigger pattern like this—like Google is not indexing a lot of your pages and there's no technical reason—you almost need to take a step back and think about the quality overall. And thinking about quality is really challenging because a lot of times it's your website and it's your baby, and of course it's the best baby ever. But taking a step back and trying to look at it with the eyes of someone who is not directly involved with your website, sometimes that opens up some ideas for areas where you can improve. Where maybe if most of your website is AI generated and it worked for a while, it might be that people look at this AI-generated site and they're like, "Well, I can tell this is AI generated. There's nothing unique or valuable that is available here for me." That's not to say that all AI-generated content is bad. But sometimes you—you just run across websites where you're like, "Anyone could have written this. This tells me nothing."
Here is the video, it starts at 20:32 in:
Forum discussion at LinkedIn.
