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As AI becomes more useful and more widely available, the content it generates will become more prevalent in marketing strategies.
For digital marketing teams that create content for their brands, search engine optimization (SEO) plays a key role. Many marketers might wonder how the relationship between SEO and AI-generated content will continue to evolve, and how search engines like Google will change their guidelines for content to reflect the complex and rapidly changing generative AI environment.
In short, SEO’s role won’t change, but marketers’ roles and how or whether they use AI-generated content might.
AI-generated content cannot be categorized as good or bad for SEO on its own. While AI-generated content’s power lies in its speed and perceived quality, marketing teams can’t support brands by simply jumping on a bandwagon — whether it’s AI or some other new technology. Digital marketing teams must consider the intended content itself, including whether portions of the writing, research, proofreading or other parts of the content creation process lend themselves more to automation than others.
SEO aims to provide the most valuable, focused content to solve a user’s problem, at least according to search engine algorithms and their human evaluators. It does not really matter for SEO whether that content is human- or machine-generated. What matters for SEO is whether the content seems original, compelling, crisp and valuable. How marketers create content that meets that goal will increasingly blend human and machine processes.
A team should constantly evaluate their goals, AI’s capabilities, prompt engineering methodologies and, most of all, the brand message and content value. Teams that push the envelope on the end result of content creation will discover that any issues with raw AI-generated content are gone by the time they publish quality, relevant content.
Google recently updated its guidelines for search quality evaluation, a key factor in SEO. These updated guidelines specifically reference AI-generated content and emphasize the importance of transparency and ensuring AI-generated content is unique and valuable for readers.
Google gives site content the lowest rating if it determines it has little originality and no editing or human curation. It focuses on de-emphasizing spam and scaled content abuse — creating a lot of unoriginal content with minimal value for readers — and promoting content that meets its criteria of experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness.
Many of Google’s guidelines also offer advice to organizations and content creators who handle AI-generated content. For example, content creators should disclose when they use AI to remain transparent and build consumer trust.
Large language models, such as ChatGPT, carry some risk of plagiarism, as the LLM might repeat verbatim some of the material it was trained on. Machine learning does not understand the human relevance of the content it processes. Content creators must disclose any content generated from tools built on LLMs to maintain their SEO rankings and avoid penalties from search engines.
Content marketing, management and creation jobs have changed with AI-generated content, including the need to validate and refine raw data provided by the algorithms. However, the core purpose remains the same: to provide original, valuable content that does not read like spam. Google also aims to evaluate — whether by human agents or Google algorithms — which pages provide high-quality content and, accordingly, promote them.
While AI-generated content can lower costs and increase employee efficiency, it brings risks that marketers should consider before using AI-generated text, images and videos. These include the following:
To incorporate AI-generated content effectively into workflows, brands should take time to develop policies regarding its use and maintain and update these policies frequently.
For example, brands should consider the following best practices:
As AI-generated content becomes more common, content teams must understand its effect on SEO best practices. If brands follow Google’s guidelines and augment AI content with quality human oversight and plagiarism reviews, content managers and leaders can continue to maintain high SEO rankings.
AI-generated content creation can help a business, but it is not a panacea. To succeed with SEO and AI-generated content, brands should blend AI’s benefits with human creativity and oversight. Together, this can maintain or enhance content’s search engine performance and deliver valuable, engaging content to consumers.
Editor’s note: This article was originally published in 2023 and was updated to reflect changes in AI-generated content and SEO.
Jordan Jones is a writer versed in enterprise content management, component content management, web content management and video-on-demand technologies.
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