AI Blogs for Trades - Why AI Blogs Are Killing Your Google Rankings

Google has a name for what's happening across the UK trades industry right now. They call it “scaled content abuse.” And sites doing it — whether the tradesperson knows it or not — are getting quietly deindexed every single day.

I'm Gary Pratten, founder of My Local Trades. I've been building websites and doing SEO for UK tradespeople for nearly 20 years. Before that I was an electrician for over three decades. I'm going to walk you through what's going wrong, why Google cares, and exactly how to use AI to grow your business instead of damaging it.

First, a quick disclaimer: I'm not anti-AI

I want to be absolutely clear about where I'm coming from. We use AI every single day in our office for plenty of other things — drafting internal emails, tidying up meeting notes, brainstorming ideas, speeding up admin. It's one of the most useful tools to land in our industry in twenty years.

But for the actual blog content that goes on our customers' websites? Never. That's a deliberate decision we've made, and the rest of this article explains why.

The two ways AI blog content is going wrong in the trades industry

Over the last 18 months I've watched this play out across hundreds of trade websites. The damage looks the same, but it comes from two different places.

1. Marketing companies selling “hands-off” AI blog services

There's a wave of marketing companies and software platforms aggressively targeting UK tradespeople with the same pitch:

“Thirty blog posts a month, on autopilot. Rank number one on Google while you sleep. You don't need to do anything — we'll handle it all. Save thousands on copywriters.”

Here's what's actually happening behind the scenes. The marketing company never speaks to the tradesperson. They never see a photo of a real job. They never ask about the areas you cover or the unusual problems you've solved this month. They just feed a topic into an AI tool, take whatever comes out, slap your logo on it, and publish it to your site. Job done.

From their side, it's a brilliant business model. From yours, it's quietly destroying your Google rankings.

2. Tradespeople using AI themselves with no real input

This one nobody talks about, but it's just as common. A tradesperson types something like “write me a blog about EICRs in Maidstone” into ChatGPT. AI generates something that reads okay on the surface. The tradesperson skims it, thinks “yeah that sounds about right,” and copies it onto their website.

There's no real input from them. No specific job. No customer's actual problem they solved. No photos of real work. No mention of the street they were on or the unusual situation they walked into. It's just generic AI text dressed up as their voice. And Google can spot it from space.

Why both approaches fail Google's tests (and they're getting stricter)

Google has two specific frameworks that make AI-generated trade content particularly risky: YMYL and E-E-A-T. If you've not heard of these before, the next two minutes might be the most important thing you read this year about your website.

YMYL: “Your Money or Your Life”

Google classifies certain types of content as YMYL: “Your Money or Your Life.” These are topics where bad information could genuinely cause someone harm — medical advice, financial guidance, legal information, and crucially for our industry, trade work.

Electrical work, plumbing, gas, roofing, and most construction-related content all fall under YMYL because they directly affect a homeowner's safety. Get the advice wrong and someone could get electrocuted, flooded, gassed or worse. Google knows this. So the quality bar for YMYL content is deliberately set higher than for, say, a blog about gardening tips.

I should know — I was an electrician for over 30 years. If a homeowner reads a YouTube video and tries to wire their own consumer unit based on dodgy advice, that's a real-world safety issue. Google takes that seriously, and so should you.

E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness

Pair YMYL with Google's E-E-A-T framework and you've got an industry where Google specifically wants to see content that could only have been written by someone with real-world experience. Not someone who's read a few articles online. Not an AI trained on the entire internet. Someone who's actually done the work.

Generic AI text fails every pillar of E-E-A-T:

• No real experience — AI hasn't been on a job
• No demonstrable expertise — no qualifications, no track record
• No authority specific to your local area or trade
• No trust signals like real photos, real customer stories, or real job locations

Google's algorithm is increasingly sophisticated at spotting this gap, and the penalty is brutal: deindexed pages, dropped rankings, or worse, a manual action against your whole site. Google has published the spam policies in plain English. It's worth a read.

If you're going to use AI yourself, here's how to give it the best chance

Right, let's be realistic. Not every tradesperson can afford a proper human-written content service, and I respect anyone who wants to crack on and do it themselves. So if you've decided you're going to use AI to write your own blogs, here's how to give yourself the best chance of actually ranking instead of getting penalised.

The principle is simple: AI is an aid, not a replacement. Let it do the boring typing. Keep the thinking, the experience, and the expertise human.

Here's a step-by-step process you can use today, even if you've got no marketing background, that will pass Google's YMYL and E-E-A-T tests and start building you proper authority in your area:

Total time from start to finish, including the photos? Around 30-45 minutes. That's one proper, ranking-friendly, YMYL-passing blog post a month. One a month is plenty. It will absolutely smash fifty generic AI-generated posts in Google's eyes.

Or, the human-written alternative (what we do at My Local Trades)

If you've read the 7 steps above and thought “that's still a lot of work I haven't got time for,” you're not alone. Most tradespeople genuinely don't have the time, the writing background, or the SEO knowledge to do this properly. Which is exactly why we exist — and why we made the deliberate decision NOT to use AI for our customers' blog content.

Every single one of our customers gets a proper monthly conversation. We ask about the jobs they've done that month, the unusual ones, the recurring questions they're getting from customers, the areas they've been working in. They send us photos from real jobs. They tell us about the tricky bits. We get the raw material from them directly.

Then Lisa, Lillie or Ranjali writes it up properly. By hand. No AI. No shortcuts. Real human writing, based on the tradesperson's real job, in a tone that matches how they'd actually talk to a customer. We handle all the SEO bits — local keywords, internal linking, schema markup, meta descriptions, image alt text — and the customer approves it before it goes live.

It takes us several hours per blog. That's the work. That's why our customers rank, year after year, while sites using the autopilot model are watching their rankings disappear. AI cannot replicate this. Because the value isn't in the typing — it's in actually knowing the tradesperson and the work.

Quick self-check: is your blog content damaging your rankings?

Right now, before you close this tab, open up your website and pull up your three most recent blog posts. Read them with fresh eyes and ask yourself honestly:

If you're answering “no” to most of those, your blog content is almost certainly hurting your rankings rather than helping them. The good news? You can turn it around. Either start applying the 7 steps above to your DIY AI posts, or get a human team writing them properly. Either way works. The autopilot version doesn't.

Final thought

AI is the most powerful tool to land in our industry in a generation. Used properly, as an aid to your own real-world work with proper editing and real photos, it can absolutely help you produce decent blog content. We just don't use it that way for our customers' content, because we've made a deliberate decision that 100% human-written is the standard we want our name attached to.

If you wouldn't let an unqualified DIYer wire a customer's house, please don't let an unqualified AI “wire” your business's online presence. Either learn to use it properly, or get a human team to do it for you. The cost of getting it wrong looks small in the short term and gets very, very big over time.