Duplicate Content: How Does AI Handle It?

You’ve heard it from us time and time again: ALWAYS make sure the content you share on your site and on the web is unique. Duplicate or reposted content from another source is entirely worthless to tell your brand’s individual story, differentiate your medical practice from your competitors, and earn authority and trust online.

But given the transformation taking place in AI search, does this dictum still hold true? Spoiler alert: it does, and in fact, even posting very similar content on your site can lead to confusion in AI engines when trying to determine the right place to link to when citing sources.

Let’s take a closer look at why unique content matters more than ever in the age of AI!

AI and Sources

In a kind of “show your work” situation, all AI engines will cite where they are pulling information from when formulating a response. That way, a user can dive deeper or verify the accuracy of what they’re being told. But how do AI engines determine which URLs to cite? That’s a key question both for clients who are seeking increased visibility in AI answers and for our question at hand – how does AI handle duplicate content.

Just like in Google results, if all you’re offering is a rehashed bit of info that can be found a billion other places online, you have absolutely no chance of getting visibility in AI. The way to get visibility is to offer your unique facts and perspectives – things like what to expect at a consultation at your office, where a surgery will be performed, any customized techniques used, average costs, and more. This way, when a user queries an AI engine like ChatGPT about “does Dr. X offer the Fleur-de-Lis tummy tuck?” or “how much will upper eyelid surgery cost me?”, they are more likely to get your content surfaced in the sources cited.

The Mechanics of Content Indexing

A recent post on the Bing Webmaster Blog gets more in-depth about the advantage unique content has when AI engines are determining source pages. Let’s suppose you still have some “regional” landing pages on your website, which was a common SEO tactic a decade or more ago. Those pages might talk about “Breast Lift in Town A,” “Breast Lift in Town B,” and “Breast Lift in Town C.” They’re largely similar, but trying to capture different local searchers.

The problem comes when these stale pages, which are all pretty much the same, are confused by an AI engine for the Breast lift content you’ve been keeping up to date. According to the managers of Microsoft AI, their LLM groups “near-duplicate” pages into a single cluster and then makes a choice about which one is most accurate. It won’t always go with the most recent, longest, or most linked-to page. So as a result, your duplicate, stale content may become “authoritative” within the AI engine. Uh-oh.

Other Problems with Duplicate Content

Duplicate content can pose a challenge to AI engines in other ways, including:

• Clarity & Confusion – If you have many pages that are nearly the same, it dilutes signal strength and you effectively end up competing with yourself for AI mentions.
• Cosmetic Differences – A real user may be able to see that identical content is laid out in very different ways on several landing pages, but AI engines can often struggle to tell the difference.
• “Update Lag” – You may be working hard to keep a few of your pages au courant, but other duplicate pages still take up bandwidth for indexing and may slow down how quickly you get credit for content updates.

What You Can Do

1. Make sure you get credit – If some of your content is particularly popular, it may have been picked up by an industry site, local news source, or regional blog. That’s all well and good, but careful use of canonical tags will ensure that you still get credit as the original, authoritative source of that content.
2. Set campaign pages to “no index” – If you are using landing pages to track the performance of a Google Ads or offline campaign, make sure those pages are not index by Google or AI search if they are largely similar to your main content pages. Better still, when the campaigns are over, remove these outdated pages.
3. Review any “local” content – If you have regional content pages that all pretty much look the same, it’s probably time to either make them meaningfully different or take them down. Search engines don’t really love this content anyway, and don’t really need your help matching up local users to local services.
4. Dot the i’s, cross the t’s – There are a bunch of technical reasons why a search engine or AI engine may perceive duplicate content on your site, even if it’s not really there. Have your agency check to make sure HTTP and HTTPS versions of your site are seen as one and the same, uppercase and lowercase URLs don’t make a difference, and any content on staging sites remains hidden from crawlers.
5. Reindex – Whenever you make meaningful changes to your site, it’s a good idea to request reindexing in Google Webmaster Tools or a tool like IndexNow available in Bing. AI engines are lagging search engines in terms of content recency, so it helps to do everything you can to ensure all places where your content may be found are giving you credit for the most recent content possible.

Duplicate content is worse than useless. It’s actually muddying the waters and weakening your visibility in AI engines and Google. Root it out, kill it off, and replace it with unique info no one else but you can provide on the web. That way, AI engines and search engines are more likely to understand and value your content, and reference the resource you want them to. Do this right and your practice stands a real chance when it comes to earning mentions in AI engines and becoming an authoritative source for key information about the services you perform.