# Can Google Tell If Your Blog Was Written by AI? The Answer Is Worse Than That

Google doesn't need to detect AI content. It scores the effort behind every page, and leaked documents show exactly how. Here's what that means for moving companies buying cheap blog packages.

- Canonical URL: https://movermarketing.ai/blog/google-content-effort-signal
- Category: Content Marketing
- Author: Nicholas DiMoro
- Read time: 8 min read
- Tags: content marketing, AI content, Google rankings

## Summary

If your agency is charging you for blog content, there is a decent chance they are generating it with AI, running it through a "humanizer," and calling it a deliverable. And for the last couple of years, the industry argument about that has been the wrong one: can Google detect AI content or not? Ann Smarty just published a sharp piece on this https://www.annsmarty.com/p/content-effort-one-of-googles-signals , and he

## Key Takeaways

- Google's quality rater guidelines mention 'effort' over 100 times and define it as the human work visibly present on a page.
- The leaked Google Content Warehouse API documents contain an attribute literally called contentEffort, described as an LLM-based effort estimate for article pages.
- Google is not hunting AI content. It is hunting low-effort content, and mass-produced AI articles are the cheapest way to produce exactly that.
- Since the January 2025 guidelines revision, content with little to no effort, originality, or added value gets rated Lowest, even if you cite your sources.
- The fix is not a better prompt. It is putting real knowledge from your actual business onto the page.

## Main Sections

- The word "effort" appears over 100 times in Google's own guidelines
- The leaked documents put a name on it: contentEffort
- "We reward high-quality content however it is produced" was never a green light
- What this looks like for a moving company
- Effort is not what you think it is
- So what do you actually do about it

## FAQs

### Does Google penalize AI-generated content?

Google does not penalize content for being AI-generated. Its spam policies target scaled content abuse, meaning many pages produced to manipulate rankings rather than help people, no matter how they were created. The quality rater guidelines also state that using generative AI tools alone does not determine a page's quality rating. The risk is not the tool. It is publishing high volumes of low-effort content nobody reviewed or improved.

### What is Google's content effort signal?

Content effort is a concept from Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines, where it is defined as the extent to which a human being actively worked to create satisfying content. The 2024 Google Content Warehouse API leak also exposed an internal attribute called contentEffort, described as an LLM-based effort estimation for article pages. The leak confirms the attribute exists, though it does not prove exactly how much weight it carries in rankings.

### Can I still use AI to help write my moving company's blog posts?

Yes, if a knowledgeable human is driving. AI works well as a drafting assistant, an outline generator, or a research aid. What fails is generating finished articles from a prompt and publishing them without adding your real experience, your actual pricing knowledge, your service area specifics, or anything else that could not have been produced by copying what already ranks.

### How do I know if my agency is publishing low-effort content on my site?

Ask one question about any post they deliver: what is on this page that only someone who knows my business could have written? If the answer is nothing, if the same article could run on any moving company's site in any city with the company name swapped, it is low-effort content by Google's definition.

### Will longer blog posts rank better than short ones?

Length is not effort. A 300-word page containing a real price range from your market or a genuine lesson from a difficult job can outscore a 3,000-word article that paraphrases ten other articles. Google judges what is visibly on the page, not how long it is or how long it took to make.