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With the widespread use of ChatGPT and other AI tools at our disposal, some have turned to creating and publishing AI-generated content on their websites in the hopes of winning quick rankings boosts. However, with Google instructing their Quality Raters to assign the lowest quality rating to AI-generated content with low value add, AI-generated content has a short shelf life for organic search benefit. It could ultimately lead to penalties or negative core update algorithm impacts.
That’s not to say there isn’t an effective way to use ChatGPT in your content marketing strategy, but there are major limitations if you’re trying to create valuable content for both users and search engines.
Important aspects of content marketing are publishing consistently and publishing content specifically when most relevant, to maximize audience reach. AI tools can help identify and forecast trends, create a publishing schedule, and diversify content to reach your target audience at the most relevant time.
If you have writer’s block or need a list of fresh topics to consider, AI can give you lots of interesting ideas for new content. It is limited in terms of keyword research capabilities because it has no access to keyword demand data, so a human still needs to do keyword research. But AI can riff on the valuable data to start the flow of ideas.
When writing content as a subject matter expert, it’s easy to get lost in the weeds with highly technical terms and examples. Not all users, especially potential new customers, know the jargon, so AI can be used to clarify content to a potential user with less knowledge. Ask your AI tool to summarize something for you at a kindergarten level or a sixth-grade level for an easy-to-understand synopsis you can use as a starting point.
At the same time, when researching a content topic, especially one you may be less familiar with, it can be hard to navigate the industry jargon and definitions. AI can provide clarity or context, and cut down on your research time.
After you’ve identified your content topic and the overall point you are trying to convey, AI can generate a content outline with content “chunks,” headings, bullets, etc. It’s important to treat any kind of output as a guide, however, and write the content yourself without resorting to AI generation.
AI can take blog or other lengthy content and concisely summarize it for other marketing channels, such as social media, newsletters, videos, and more. This expands the content’s audience reach while enticing the user to click through to your site for more information. Also, although there is no research to support this, a growing trend for targeting AI Overviews is including a TL;DR summary in the article, which AI can also help with.
While AI can be an exciting way to save time and boost creativity, there are definitely some limitations when using it to benefit organic search performance.
The foundational principles Google uses to evaluate content are experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trust (E-E-A-T). Google values content that includes real-world experience and relays trust, showing that the creator is an expert in the industry. AI-generated content lacks the personal touch needed to relay E-E-A-T, and AI-generated “experience” fails to capture the real-world authenticity.
Human emotion and natural speech are crucial for establishing E-E-A-T and author credibility. AI struggles to capture the human tone or form a personal opinion, particularly when dealing with sensitive content. When Google’s quality raters evaluate content, one element they consider is who the author is and what their reputation is. Content that doesn’t give Google’s quality raters a sense of the author’s background will very likely be deemed lower quality.
According to a recent study by Chatbase, ChatGPT is inaccurate 12% of the time. Search engines are perfectly capable of comparing the information on your site with the information it gleans from the rest of the internet to determine what’s likely accurate. Inaccurate information can hurt your rankings, and having a significant amount of incorrect information can cause site quality issues during a core algorithm update, which is very hard to crawl back from.
AI-generated content is more likely to include “fluff,” content that doesn’t provide value but sounds really nice. The unnecessary content is frustrating for visitors to sift through as they seek information, and the lack of value can damage both your brand reputation and rankings.
AI-generated content amalgamates content from other websites, which creates a homogenized summary of what already exists. That’s the opposite of the unique, high-quality content search engines are looking for.
Because AI has no window into numerical keyword data and SEO best practices, there is no guarantee that the highest-value or correct intent-based keywords will be used in the generated copy. As a result, AI-generated content is likely to overuse, underuse, or misuse keywords. Also, AI cannot be relied on to include internal linking within the content to help transfer link authority more deeply into the site.
Although there is a place for using ChatGPT and other AI tools for content creation, it cannot be your only tool. The most trusted asset for writing content for SEO benefit is a human copywriter with true, human experience.
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