Can search engines tell if AI has been used to plagiarise content?

Google doesn’t seem to be able to detect content that has been scraped and then reworked using AI. Or maybe it can, and just doesn’t care. What does this mean for the SEO industry?

By 

Victoria Spall

, 

published on 

A post on X caused quite a stir over the weekend.

It started with a case study being published by Jake Ward, claiming that he’d pulled off ‘an SEO heist’ that stole 3.6M total traffic from a competitor.

He went on to explain exactly how he did it.

People are mad. And it’s also made people question whether this is an ‘ethical’ way to do SEO. Are we seeing a return to ‘black hat’ tactics that work?

TL;DR: someone exported a competitor’s sitemap, turned the URLs into article titles, and used an AI copywriting tool to create 1,800 articles based on those titles for their client’s site. And it worked. Based on the screenshots they shared, it looks like by the end of November, the site will exceed 500,000 sessions per month.

This was obviously very frustrating for the owners of the site that was targeted, Exceljet. The site has been around for 10 years and they have clearly invested a great deal of time and effort into producing content for their site.

For now, at least, Google doesn’t seem to be able to detect that the articles on this site were scraped and repurposed using AI, even though it appears these articles were published en masse. Or perhaps, it just doesn’t care?

When I wrote a few months ago about how AI was going to break the internet, this was exactly what I meant.

If it’s happened to them, could it happen to you?

Yeah, it could. Easily. It’s hard to detect, and almost impossible to prevent entirely.

It almost feels like a resurgence in being able to manipulate search results at the push of a button, as many SEOs did back in the day by using spammy link-building tactics and article spinning.

The use of AI copywriting tools has generally been frow