AI tools have made it easier than ever to publish content. Some folks jumped on the bandwagon immediately, while others held off, but it’s hard to resist a tool that saves you so much time. And why not use it? Besides the issue with hallucinations and incorrect facts, which can be double-checked, what’s the downside really?
Well, Google has finally caught up and could punish your website. This isn’t to say that AI should never be used to assist with content writing, but using it carelessly could destroy your firm’s search visibility.
How Does Google Detect AI Content?
Google cracking down on what it considers to be low-value content isn’t new. We know from a 2024 leak of Google’s internal documentation that the search engine uses a few metrics to weed out weak content, namely its ‘contentEffort’ and ‘originalContentScore’ metrics. While these aren’t necessarily specific to AI-produced content, we know that AI content is both low effort and largely unoriginal.
Now, a January 2026 report from Google provides an in-depth explanation of the methods it uses to detect AI content: Watermarking and AI Classifiers.
When an AI tool writes content, it uses probability to decide the next ‘token’, which is a chunk of characters. Watermarking works by having the model provider, like Google, secretly influence those choices using a hidden key. That key subtly steers the AI toward certain tokens over others in a pattern that’s invisible to a human reader but detectable by a scanner, essentially leaving a hidden watermark. When Google’s detection tool later analyzes a piece of text, it uses that same secret key to check whether the expected pattern is there. If it is, the content was almost certainly generated by that provider’s model.
AI Classifiers are a simpler method of detection, ones you’ve probably seen in action if you’ve used an AI detection tool online. Instead of using a secret key, this method simply recognizes patterns in the text and style of the writing. For example, AI tools often write using unnaturally uniform-length sentences or overuse certain phrases. This method is much easier because it works on any text, regardless of what tool produced it, but it’s unreliable and often mistakes human writing for AI writing.
Google uses a hybrid of these two detection methods, which is the strongest way to do it.
Why Google Has an Incentive to Crack Down
Crawling and indexing the entire internet is extremely expensive. So with the huge volume of AI-produced content being published every day all over the world, it’s financially impacting Google. With a budget of nearly $185 billion, Google needs to build huge data centers to handle all of this content, as well as its AI tool Gemini.
And since a lot of AI content is seen as not valuable to users, why index it at all? Google’s systems now aim to detect “Scaled Content Abuse” to avoid indexing any content that it deems unworthy. If Google starts to allow any content to appear on its search engine, it will become inundated with bad results, and users will turn to other search engines.
Providing users with misinformation could also lead to legal or political consequences. There is already regulatory pressure to be transparent around AI-generated content, and the demand for compliance will only grow with time.
The Real-World Consequences for Law Firm Websites
For a few years now, we’ve been seeing big traffic declines on websites using AI-generated content, and legal websites are no exception. Law firms either have an in-house content writer or use an agency, but either way, it’s important for attorneys to understand how their writers use AI.
One of the core pillars of SEO is E-A-T, with the T being trust, and producing bad content can lose Google’s trust. If Google doesn’t like your content, it can demote it or even deindex an entire website. They’ve done this to spam for years, and AI-generated content falls under that umbrella.
If your law firm relies on traffic and leads from Google, having your content ignored or your website penalized by Google can be detrimental. Most of the time, you won’t even know that you’re being penalized – you’ll just lose traffic, and you won’t know why.
What Law Firms Should Do Instead
The big risk here isn’t necessarily using AI to assist with content, it’s being lazy about it.
Some of the worst things you can do include:
- Producing AI-generated content without any human editing
- Mass-producing large numbers of extremely similar pages
- Publishing weak content that doesn’t hold genuine legal experience or expertise; similarly, publishing vague content that isn’t specific to your jurisdiction
Some low-risk ways you can continue to use AI include:
- Researching (always double-checking your facts outside of AI)
- Creating outlines
- Generating first drafts as long as they get heavily edited by a human
- Editing your grammar and improving clarity
- Administrative tasks like generating titles and meta descriptions
The more you can get an attorney’s eyes on your firm’s content to add perspective and expertise, the better. Ultimately, we want to create content that is valuable to humans, earning their trust as a reader and ideally as a client too.
You can also check out our blog post on this topic.
