Last week, Google announced that it has added a new tool to its arsenal. A Google Labs project called Opal, you might have already seen some news and opinions about it… not all of them positive. The immediate reaction can be summarised as ‘indignation’. How can Google justify launching a tool that will enable people to abuse its own terms of service?
When I first heard about this development, I was sceptical. That said, our team embodies our core company values: we are respectful, fair, and open to change. With this in mind, let’s critically review all the available information and consider our strategic response. Can this new tool genuinely raise the bar for SEO performance?
What is Google Opal?
Google Opal is an experimental, no-code AI tool launched by Google on 24th July 2025 and was rolled out to 160 countries, including the UK, on 6th November 2025. The tool has been developed to simplify the creation of complex, multi-step AI applications.
How does Google Opal work?
Opal uses Google’s advanced Large Language Models, including Gemini, to build automated “mini-apps” using natural language instructions.
The LLM doesn’t truly understand the language, but it understands how words are connected. LLMs like Gemini are statistical prediction machines, which is why the human comprehension of prompts and review of outputs is absolutely essential. The true power of LLMs lies in speeding up processes. The ability to provide a logical output empowers a non-coder to ask the LLM to “Generate five blog post titles that will answer commonly asked questions about [PRODUCT].
What can it be used for?
Of course, Google has marketed Opal as the ultimate creation tool. As long as you can explain what you want, you’re only limited by your imagination. The mini apps you can create with the tool are scalable automation engines that empower you to design and build workflows, to do research, or create content.
Using your own words, as a user, you can create complex, multi-step logic without code. This could look like:
Step 1: “Build a tool that researches [TOPIC]”
Step 2: “Write a draft for a blog post about [TOPIC]”
Step 3: Save the draft in this folder [FOLDER]
You can use it for personal projects, but as a performance marketing agency, we are most interested in how it can be used to make our marketing better.
Why is the SEO industry unhappy with Google Opal?
In their own generative AI guidelines, Google says, “using generative AI tools or other similar tools to generate many pages without adding value for users may violate Google’s spam policy on scaled content abuse.”
SEO industry experts have been quick to criticise the product, pointing out that this is somewhat hypocritical of Google. The point that has raised the most consternation is that Google is directly promoting that this tool can help people generate marketing assets like blogs and videos.
We can see scenarios where Opal could be hugely beneficial as my colleague, Charlie points out:
“Google has a lot of people to please, and for one-person marketing teams already spinning lots of plates, this tool is going to be really helpful for them (if used in the right way).” – Charlie Cheyette, SEO Strategist
Google’s advice is: don’t use generative AI to create content, with the most recent announcement providing their very own means to generate AI content. There is a delicious irony that isn’t lost on the SEO community, although Google’s counter to this criticism is that people should focus on intent and value, not the tool itself.
What do SEOs really think about Opal?
We haven’t had a chance to play with it yet because, despite the tool being apparently available in the UK since last week, most of us are still seeing a message that the tool isn’t available in our country yet!
Our SEO team holds a range of opinions. Most of us are curious about how it will work in practice.
We definitely acknowledge that there will be those who are angry about businesses and individuals being penalised or pushed into obscurity by “AI slop” when it is clearly against Google’s own guidelines. It is clear that some may see this as a cynical and unfair move by Google.
For me, this made me think about the early days in my career when ‘content spinning’ was a challenge to face when trying to be legit against a lot of less legit practices.
Article spinning involved generating bulk content quickly by making small changes to existing articles so that people could create lots of “unique” versions. It worked primarily by swapping words and phrases with synonyms. By creating lots of “unique” articles on an impossible number of websites, bad actors could inflate their link counts and manipulate the system. The 2011 Panda update and Google’s Spam guideline updates explicitly defined content spinning as a violation of its guidelines.
Of course, Generative AI is different, and if you want to learn more about this, check out my colleague, Rhianne Moriarty’s article about how to optimise for Generative AI search.
I think this is a far more exciting time because, whilst I think that a lot of creative sparks can come in the procedural and manual tasks, by using generative AI tools as a jumping off point, we can bring so much more interesting insights and humanity to our marketing content and really focus on how we delight and enthral our audiences. We have been using AI to help us automate content at scale for a while now, and there are lots of use cases currently possible, and yet to be developed.
I asked my SEO colleagues for their thoughts, and they responded with some really thoughtful and insightful comments.
“For me, the focus now has to be on differentiation. Efficiency is inevitable, but value will increasingly come from what can’t be automated, human perspective, lived experience, and genuine insight. If we can use tools like this to free up time for that kind of creativity and expertise, then it could be a positive step forward rather than just another wave of sameness.” – Nassim Salhi, Senior SEO Strategist
“AI tools are now 100% part of any good SEO/content workflow, and Google is simply reacting to that trend with its own tool. Rather than looking at all the ways this can be used by spammers, we should be spending our energy on thinking of ways to use the tool to remove repetitive, manual tasks from SEO workflows and enhance content using AI.” – Nathan Dale, SEO Lead
What comes next?
Google and SEO have never stood still, and change in this industry is constant. If you want to use AI to automate content at scale, try out our free tool Oapy. This was built in-house by Senior Technical Specialist, Luke Davis and is a fantastic resource. If you want to learn more about how we do Generative optimisation at Impression, and what it’s like to work with us, get in touch today.
