AI articles still rank if a person checks them first
Julian Goldie says sites he watches grew through the September spam update, and credits manual review rather than the writing method.
One SEO says the September spam update did not kill AI-written content, it killed unchecked content. Julian Goldie SEO posted that the update, which finished rolling out on October 8 after starting September 24, targeted AI spam, and yet sites he watches kept growing straight through it.
His numbers: one AI site went from 0 to 79 clicks a day, another from 0 to 235 clicks a day, and one article hit the number one spot twice within 7 hours of being published. These are his own claims about his own sites. Nobody has independently verified them, and Google has not said anything about them.
The line he draws
Goldie's argument is that Google stopped caring about how a page was produced and started caring about whether a human checked it. His reasoning is that AI models predict words rather than look up facts, so anything they write needs a person to confirm it before it goes live.
He lists the parts of the process he says survived the update. A checklist the AI follows before it writes. A real case study from your own experience inside every article. A manual review before publishing. Your face, your bio and your brand on the page.
In a second post he adds a few more steps. Pull your Search Console data and find keywords with high impressions but zero clicks, because that gap means you need a dedicated page. Answer the search question in the first sentence instead of a warm-up intro. Add tables, FAQs, key takeaways and internal links (links from one page of your site to another).
What to make of it
This is one person's read, not a Google announcement, so treat the click numbers as his claim rather than proof. The underlying point lines up with what Google has said elsewhere about effort and about checking AI writing by hand, which we covered earlier.
The practical bit is cheap to act on. If you use AI to draft anything on your site, read it line by line and confirm every fact, price, date and name before it publishes. Then add the one thing a model cannot produce on its own, which is something you did or measured yourself. A job you completed, a test you ran, a number from your own books.
As Goldie puts it, if Google can make your content itself, there is no reason to rank you. A page that only restates what is already everywhere is the one at risk, whoever or whatever typed it.
If Google can make your content itself, why would it rank you? It won't.
Google no longer cares HOW you make content. It cares if you checked it.
Be the person who already knew
One email a day. Under three minutes. You will hear about a Google change before it shows up in your traffic.