Does content generation by ChatGPT affect search engine indexing by Google and Bing? The answer is: Yes, probably.

I had posted two articles written by ChatGPT. One article was a very general explanation on online personality tests. The other one was a very specific explanation on parsing multi-part version codes in C. Both were crawled and not indexed.

I also posted a couple of insignificant short notes around the same time. These were crawled and indexed by both search engines.

Bing reports for the pages that are not indexed: “The inspected URL is known to Bing but has some issues which are preventing indexation.”

Then I published two posts about ‘geo-tagging’ action cam imagery with Mapillary tools. One post explained a method using video files and the other one a method using time-lapsed image stills. Both were written by me, but I added a general introduction to Mapillary to the first one. This added more context to post, but prevented it from being indexed. After removing the introduction, the page got indexed.

Yet no rule follows from this. I had ChatGPT write an article about a very simple Prisoner’s Dilemma simulation. The article was indexed by both Google and Bing. Apparently the algorithms judged that the article had enough value and unique content to be indexed.