Last year, as a test, I removed all of the comments off a WordPress blog I own - Half were auto-generated, but a lot were genuine.
Around 1/2 of posts had comments, and most had a minimum of 10.
Site traffic fell from around 1,800 organics/mo to under 500.

So, as I always say, we have to ask ourselves as SEOs:
- Does Google detect comments as UGC like other tools already do?
- Do comments count to your overall content count or as part of a "sub-content" or as content at all?
- Do comments create renewed page freshness?

In my eyes, comments are seen as UGC (User Generated Content) by Google, as even @ahrefs can detect comments as UGC. Google splits them from the body content and uses them as -
A) Trust Signals
B) Anti-Spam via Comment Analysis

They can also work in your favour in terms of triggering freshness due to it adding additional, new information on to the page which Google& #39;s base level spider reports the page to be re-evaluated.. Explained in as many words as you can fit in a tweet.