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Bankrate is Using AI To Write 100s of Articles: Here’s a Look at The Results
I saw someone post on Twitter about how Bankrate.com has been posting AI-generated content on their website. And they’ve been telling everyone exactly what they’re doing.
Bankrate is a huge website in the financial industry. They have tens of thousands of articles about personal finance, credit cards, real estate, and retirement.
Google says they have stricter guidelines about YMYL (your money, your life) topics, which includes personal finance.
Google says:
For pages about clear YMYL topics, we have very high Page Quality rating standards because low quality pages on such topics could potentially negatively impact a person’s health, financial stability, or safety, or the welfare or well-being of society. (source)
Bankrate’s articles fall into the YMYL category, so Google should be especially strict. If Google doesn’t like AI-written content, they definitely won’t put Bankrate’s articles near the top of the search results.
Bankrate has published 168 AI articles
Unlike most people who are trying to hide their use of AI, Bankrate is very open about using AI to create content.
Some of their articles include this disclaimer at the top and bottom of the page:
“This article was generated using automation technology and thoroughly edited and fact-checked by an editor on our editorial staff.”
That disclaimer made it easy to find all of them in Google. I searched site:https://www.bankrate.com “This article was generated using automation technology” and found every article that had the disclaimer.
There was a total of 168 results — meaning 168 articles were crawled and indexed by Google. There could be more articles that aren’t indexed yet.
Bankrate is has been publishing 15–25 articles per month with the help of AI. This is a small percentage of their content output.
They’ve published 41 articles just today.
3/41 of the articles published today have the AI disclaimer. The other 38 articles are written by people with an author profile, and there are a…
