John Mueller, a Google Search Advocate, offers three suggestions for preventing erroneous AI chatbot material from being indexed.
Highlights
- Website owners should be mindful of potential issues caused by AI chatbots that could impact the visibility and search presence of their websites.
- Mueller suggests the use of a ‘robotted iframe’, ‘robotted JavaScript file/resource’, or ‘data-nosnippet’ to prevent chatbot output from being indexed.
- The move would protect unedited and potentially inaccurate AI-generated content from appearing in search results.
John Mueller, Google’s Search Advocate, has urged website owners to think about ways to prevent artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot material from being indexed.
The public service announcement (PSA) essentially offers three distinct ways to prevent Google’s engines from indexing responses from AI chatbots.
On websites all over the world, AI chatbots are becoming more prevalent and offer immediate consumer support and engagement. However, AI-powered agents can also generate false information that website owners would not want to include in their manually edited and generated material.
How To Block Indexing Of AI Chatbot Content
Using a “robotted iframe” is Mueller’s first suggestion. Since Google can crawl iframes, this is an isolated frame that the site owner can apply a noindex directive to, preventing it from being crawled by search engine bots.
Using a “robotted JavaScript file or resource” is the second method. This means that the robots.txt file should not allow the JavaScript file containing the AI chatbot’s code, preventing search engine bots from crawling and indexing it.
The ‘data-nosnippet’ tag is the last recommendation made by Mueller. This specific-content or page-level directive prevents a certain area of a page from showing up in Google’s search snippets.
SEO Implications Of AI Chatbots
To ensure their websites have the best possible search visibility and presence, website owners should be aware of these potential problems.
AI chatbots may produce content that degrades the value or applicability of indexed content on a website, potentially impacting the SEO performance of the website as a whole.
