From blogs to social media promotions, artificial intelligence (AI) has become a go-to for many businesses wanting to streamline their content production. While AI offers great advantages, AI-generated content often faces delays in search engine indexing. This slow indexing problem applies not only to content that is fully generated by artificial intelligence but also to content that is optimized through AI assistance.
If you wonder why your AI-generated content isn’t showing in SERPs despite your best efforts, this article is for you. Let’s explore the common reasons behind these AI-content indexing challenges and how you can effectively address them.
1. Lack of Crawl Budget
One major factor that might be holding back your AI content from speedy indexing is your site’s crawl budget allocation.
Crawl budget refers to the limited number of pages Google can and wants to crawl on your site within a given timeframe. Once your crawl budget is depleted, Google will stop its crawling and indexing process, and your content will not appear in the search results.
This situation is more prone to large websites than smaller ones, as you’re likely to have more pages and content (including those assisted by AI tools) waiting to be indexed than your crawl limit.
Solution
Optimize your crawl budget by focusing on and prioritizing quality, high-value pages over quantity. To set which pages Google should and should not crawl and index, you can use the robots.txt allow/disallow technique. Consider blocking low-value pages (like category filters or redundant tags) and allow access to pages that impact your bottom line. After setting the robots.txt files, use tools like Google Search Console to monitor your crawl stats.
Get our comprehensive guide on how to use robots.txt files best here.
2. Thin or Duplicate Content
While artificial intelligence is transforming the world of content creation, adopting an “AI-only” approach to creating content leaves you at the risk of thin or duplicate content.
Thin content refers to pages with little to no value to the user, while duplicate content involves similar or identical pages that can confuse search engines on which content to rank. Because of this, Google can de-prioritize crawling your AI content and will not index AI content that lacks substance and originality.
Interestingly, Google seems to have adopted a neutral stance on AI-generated content. According to this Google Search Central article, the search engine giant is less concerned about the content’s origin and more focused on its quality. This suggests that AI can be a tool to create valuable content as long as it meets Google’s standards.
That said, it’s recommended that you take this information with a grain of salt. You should not rely heavily on fully AI-generated content, as AI content is often not unique, impacting how Google values your page and overall site quality.
Solution
To discover duplicate content on your ecommerce site, run an SEO audit using tools like Screaming Frog. It will show you the percentage of your duplicate, common, and unique content.
Pro tip: Not a fan of Screaming Frog? Try these Screaming Frog alternatives!
Go through the duplicated content findings and tweak the content to be unique. If the duplication issues are not caused by similar content messages but by technical issues, such as URL parameters, localization, or Hreflang, this duplicate content optimization tutorial blog will help you.
3. Technical SEO Issues
Even the highest-quality AI-generated content can suffer indexing problems if search engines encounter technical SEO issues. These include:
- Poor site performance: a slow-loading site not only frustrates users but also discourages search engines from indexing your artificial intelligence content. This is because Google has clarified that PageSpeed is a ranking factor, making pages that load slowly become less likely to be crawled and indexed quickly.
- Broken links: broken links can create a poor user experience and hinder search engines’ ability to crawl your site efficiently. These broken links, such as 404 errors, signal to search engines that your site may be poorly maintained.
- Improper robots.txt configuration: the robots.txt file is a critical tool for guiding search engines on which pages to crawl and which to ignore. Misconfigurations can accidentally block important pages from being indexed.
- Faulty sitemaps: an outdated or incorrectly formatted sitemap can prevent Google from discovering your new content.
Solution
Here are a few techniques to solve technical SEO issues that can occur to artificial intelligence content:
- Conduct a web performance audit of your ecommerce site to monitor its page site performance. Tools like Google PageSpeed Insights are a great solution to start.
- To fix 404 eros, you can redirect the broken URLs to a stand-alone 404 error page or implement error boundary components using this code: <Route path=”*” component={NotFound} />. Follow our tutorial on how to solve 404 errors to get the details.
- Update your sitemaps regularly and prioritize recently modified pages by listing them first based on their last modification date. This will nudge crawlers to index your freshest pages efficiently.
4. Weak Google E-E-A-T Signals
Google evaluates content quality and reliability using the E-E-A-T standard, which stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. This standard helps Google ensure that the content it promotes is credible and valuable to users.
Human-generated content often reflects personal experience, specialized knowledge, and trustworthiness, which are crucial for high E-E-A-T ratings. In contrast, AI-generated content, while quick and efficient, typically lacks the depth and nuance provided by human experience and expertise. This can make it challenging to signal high E-E-A-T to Google’s algorithms convincingly.
As a result, sites that consistently rely heavily on artificial intelligence content may be at risk of a Google penalty—being deprioritized in its indexing process.
Solution
To boost your chances of faster indexing, enhance AI content with genuine human expertise and authority signals. Use AI tools to handle the heavy lifting, like generating outlines, but always add human touch. This way, you’re not just creating content for the sake of it but to build a reliable, authoritative voice that Google and your audience will trust.
5. Lack of Internal Linking
Internal links are a crucial aspect of SEO that directly impacts how search engines crawl, index, and rank your content. This is evidenced in the current information shared on Google Search Console Insights.
In simple words, internal links act as a roadmap that guides search engines through your site. Without this roadmap, search engines might struggle to discover new content, potentially leading to slow indexing problems or even non-indexing of this content.
Solution
Start by linking your new content from relevant existing pages. For example, if you have an older blog post on a similar topic, add a link to your new content. Use descriptive anchor text that tells search engines what the linked page is about. Additionally, minimize internal links above the fold and avoid excessive linking throughout your content.
Adding internal links not only helps with indexing but also enhances user experience by providing your audience with additional resources to explore.
6. Poor User Experience
A good content isn’t just about delivering the most relevant information, but it should also be reader-friendly. Unfortunately, AI content generated without any human touch usually doesn’t factor in user experience. For instance, AI doesn’t analyze search intent to understand what’s ranking or consider how to plan, structure, and format the page for optimal user experience. Humans do that.
So, if you simply copy and paste AI-generated content onto your website without thoughtful editing, your content may struggle to index.
Furthermore, the poor reader experience can increase the bounce rates, which signal to search engines that your site isn’t providing value. This can be a significant factor in why your AI-generated content isn’t being indexed as fast as you’d like.
Related: Learn how to improve your ecommerce store’s mobile user experience by following these expert tips.
Solution
Provide a positive experience by keeping users engaged and reducing bounce rates. This will indirectly influence how quickly your content gets indexed. To ensure reader-friendly AI-generated content, you can use content auditing tools such as Hemmingway Editor or Readable.
Prerender Accelerates the Indexing of Your AI Content
AI-generated content already presents indexing challenges. These issues are amplified when your website relies heavily on JavaScript. Due to the two-step JS rendering process, JavaScript-based sites often need more time to complete indexing. To overcome this hurdle, many SEO managers and website owners leverage tools like Prerender—a technical SEO tools for rendering content.
With Prerender in your technical SEO tool arsenal, you won’t rely solely on Google’s crawling algorithms to ensure your AI content shows up on SERPs. Here is how Prerender works.
Prerender employs a dynamic rendering SEO approach to render your pages ahead of time, saving them as cache and feeding them to search engine crawlers upon request. By doing so, search engines bypass the need to render pages themselves, speeding up the indexing process while ensuring no content is left uncrawled.
These technical optimization strategies not only empower you to achieve faster indexing and boost your site’s visibility, organic traffic, and user engagement but also allow you to allocate your crawl budget efficiently, focusing on high-value pages.
Fix AI Content Slow Indexing Problems with Prerender
Artificial intelligence can significantly boost content production, but ensuring its visibility requires careful optimization. To overcome AI content indexing challenges, especially on JavaScript-heavy websites, consider Prerender.
Our dynamic rendering solution has helped over 65,000 businesses, including Haarshop, improve crawl efficiency and indexing success by up to 30%. This resulted in a more than 50% increase in organic traffic.
Sign up for Prerender today and unlock the full potential of your AI content.
