Is AI-Generated Content The Future Of SEO?

Stephen McCance April 1, 2023

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the world and is gaining traction in almost every industry. It is everywhere, from Alexa answering search queries to mobile phones autocorrecting our texts. In many industries, it is helping with a range of tasks and is being adopted for a multitude of purposes. The digital marketing industry is just one area where AI is being adopted, but is it here to stay? And is it actually as useful as it may initially seem? Are digital marketers going to be made obsolete? Or are our jobs just about to get much easier?

In search, there is a fine line between quality content production and volume based content for mass production. Top search engines have worked hard to penalise low-quality content that is purely designed to boost rankings instead of helping the end user. At the same time, they have also spent time rewarding those who create quality content that passes their sophisticated algorithm criteria. So, in this blog, we will discuss whether AI-generated content is the future of SEO.

The Surge of AI-Generated Content in Search Engines

Now, with the emergence of artificial intelligence and ChatGPT, AI generated content is disrupting the natural order of SEO. With it constantly evolving and sounding more human, it is increasingly difficult for search engines to determine what is quality content written by a human, and what is created through AI. ChatGPT is a chatbot specifically designed to create content in the same way a human would write.

This form of AI is built from GPT-3.5 which is a language model. It needs a prompt for it to work and can do anything from answering a simple question to creating a whole article of AI-generated content, which is why it has taken the world by storm. Google, amongst other search engines, are now putting their efforts into their own AI technologies which will in turn be able to detect AI content.

How Does Google Rank AI-Generated Content?

Although AI-generated content is much harder to detect than content farming, Google can sometimes still identify this content as auto-generated which in turn gets marked as spam content. Since creating the ‘helpful content algorithm’, Google has made it abundantly clear that content should be written organically with people in mind, not specifically aimed at search engines, which is why AI-generated content has its flaws as by its very nature it cannot do this. However, since ChatGPT can write unique content, how well can Google detect this?

As Google and other search engines continue to develop their AI, it is going to be more difficult to pass AI-generated content off as your own work. There are some content creators that have utilised this auto-generated content and then used AI detector tools to try and get around Google algorithms. This kind of software can help for a while, but it adds just as much time as it would take to create the content properly, and it also won’t work forever. For SEO, this could mean that you have AI-generated content on your website that gets good rankings initially, but then once Google has updated its algorithm, your website and rankings will gone and potentially face manual penalties in addition to being algorithmically penalised. This is why here at Red Cow Media, we have a talented team of content writers that specialise in writing for the end user, not just for search engines. Our efforts get sustainable results that last long-term, and AI is nowhere near being able to replicate a human touch. Whether it ever will be remains to be seen, but we suspect that by the time AI content generators such as ChatGPT are able to fully mimic human-generated content, the Google AI will have caught up and will have much more sophisticated ways of identifying content generated in an automated way.

Why Can’t AI-Generated Content Replace Humans In SEO?  

AI can write content that sounds like a human, but is it quality, or is it too good to be true? There are many platforms being created such as ChatGPT that aim to speak and explain as a human would, but the quality of its content is nowhere near the standard that a professional content creator would produce. AI can only offer information that is already available on the internet, so it can’t develop new ideas and it can’t think on its own, so spun AI-generated content is what these platforms are basically offering. AI-generated content in turn leads to many concerns involving:

• Plagiarism from other websites: lacks value and promotes duplicate content which in turn harms your rankings. 
• Content sounding like a robot: AI is still a machine, and so there are inevitably many occasions where it still sounds like one. The human touch will not be apparent in the content and in various tests content still appears to be coming out at times in a way that’s difficult to understand or makes little sense to a human user. 
• Promotes biassed opinions and offers incorrect or misinformation: Being a artificially generated based off information that’s already online, AI technology can’t differentiate between opinion based content and factual information, meaning it could potentially skew content in favour of someone else’s views. This is unfavourable and can be potentially harmful if opinion based information gets to the wrong audience. It also makes it completely unsuitable for some industries that are strongly regulated, such as the legal and medical industries.
• Can’t show off the creative experience: as it picks up all the information from what is on the internet, you can’t show off your expertise or iterate content in line with your brand/company tone of voice. Injecting warmth and intonation is impossible for a robot.
• Can be seen as spammy content: This harms your reputation and can hinder progress with rankings.

How Can We Use AI-Generated Content To Our Advantage?

As a digital agency, our skilled content writers create all their own content completely from scratch. Although we categorically will not use AI-generated content for our clients as we very much view this as lazy and cutting corners, some agencies are using AI in a number of ways which can be seen as being unethical. Some more legitimate uses for AI, however, can help with the creative process such as coming up with new topics to write about and discovering how people are using search engines which in turn allows us to optimise our custom-written content for more specific needs and audiences.

AI can help with:

• Generating high search volume topic ideas for specific audiences.
• Helping to create strategies through better and more advanced insights.
• Speeding up the research processes.

Final Thoughts

AI has brought a lot of benefits to many industries, but for the digital marketing and SEO industry, it has brought a lot of confusion to the mix and has led to many websites and agencies being penalised for using it in the wrong way. This is why we are proud to create all our content manually, and will continue to do so. If you would like to speak to us about what we can offer your business, contact us today and we will gladly help you work your way onto page one.