AI content is ranking in search, is Google's policy just like ivory

There has long been controversy over content created using Artificial Intelligence (AI). From the beginning, Google has been claiming that it will be focusing on original human-created content, but now the opposite is happening. Google recently completed the very first core update in 2025 and SEO practitioners have discovered that posts on Reddit with AI-translation content are taking off in Google Search.

According to SEO expert Glenn Gaby, millions of AI-translated Reddit posts are appearing in high ranks in Google Search in some countries. He wrote in his blog on March 27, 2025, "It looks like Reddit is once again moving rapidly up the search rankings with the March Core Update. This may be hard to hear as it has already been dominating Google since late 2023, but now it is becoming popular in even more countries." 

Google rolled out the March 13, 2025 core update after more than two weeks. The updates occur several times a year to improve Google Search systems and algorithms, but in accordance with Google policies, site owners should not worry too much about changes in traffic after the core update because, after the core update, most websites see fluctuations in rankings.

SEO expert Lily Ray (Seo strategy head of Amsive company) said that after the March core update, forum sites like Quora have suffered heavy traffic loss. In contrast, Reddit has benefited. Reddit has given clear permission to Google and other search engines for AI-translated posts in its robots.txt file. This is why its translated content is visible more.

According to Google's policies, "scraping, auto-translation, and AI-generated content is considered spam if it is not valuable to the user."

Google has a separate policy for spam content under which most websites that publish AI-translated content are penalized by Google, but Reddit did not suffer any damage. SEO expert Glenn Gaby said, "If other sites translate content on a large scale with AI, then Google bans them, but this did not happen in the case of Reddit."

In 2024, a $60 million/year deal was signed between Google and Reddit. Under this deal, Google was allowed to use Reddit's content to train its AI models, meaning Reddit's content is already valuable to Google. This is why AI-translated Reddit content is moving up in Google's search rankings.