Google says human rewrites aren’t enough to recover from bad AI content

Websites that have published low-quality AI-generated material may not recover simply by replacing the content with human-written pages, says Google Search Advocate John Mueller.

Mueller’s comments came in response to a Reddit user who asked whether a site showing 'Crawled - currently not indexed” could improve if AI-generated English content were replaced with original Portuguese content authored by humans.

Mueller said the core issue is not whether content is written by AI or humans, but whether the site provides meaningful value. “I wouldn’t think about it as AI or not, but about the value that the site adds to the web. Just rewriting AI content by a human won’t change that; it won’t make it authentic,” he wrote on the platform.

He suggested treating a complete content overhaul as a fresh start: “If you want to change all your site's content, I’d approach it as essentially starting over with no content, and consider what it is that you want to do on the site, not as a checklist of pages that you need to tweak manually.”

Mueller noted that sites attempting to improve from what he called a “bad state” may face a longer recovery timeline than new domains. “Starting with a bad state will be harder than starting with a new domain (and perhaps take longer, maybe much longer), but sometimes that’s still worthwhile,” he said.

The guidance aligns with Google’s broader emphasis on producing helpful, original material that demonstrates expertise and serves a clear audience need. Mueller indicated that domains with a history of low-value content may require significant time to regain trust, and in some cases, beginning with a new domain may lead to faster results.