AI has become without doubt the hottest topic in tech over the last few years. The technology is advancing at breakneck speed, while being integrated into all aspects of daily life from flipping burgers to brushing your teeth.
One widespread use of AI is for writing marketing copy. According to a study by Botco.ai, 73% of marketing professionals say their companies are using AI to help create content, with 49% using it to produce final copy.
More and more organisations are realising the opportunities AI provides to produce content quickly and at scale while saving them time and money. I am getting asked about the benefits and pitfalls of AI copywriting more and more and one of the most common questions that comes up is whether using AI content on a website will help or harm their rankings in search engines.
AI content can include any content: text, image or video, that has been generated by a computer program, but makes sense to humans and fulfils a purpose, rather than just being a random combination of letters or images. There are many tools out there that can do this but the most well-known and easily accessible is ChatGPT.
ChatGPT is an AI chatbot that can produce copywriting for many different purposes when requested, including full articles, social media post copy and meta data. It produces the copy based on prompts or messages provided by users.
Lots of websites rely heavily on search engines for driving people to their sites. For many businesses, the majority of customers find them through searching and most of these searches go through Google. Google’s search algorithm decides who appears top when you search and a drop in rankings can have a big impact on the bottom line. Google will penalise sites that go against their content policies and can even remove a site from their search index entirely. For this reason it is right to consider the SEO impact before making major content strategy decisions, such as creating AI content.
Yes, Google can identify AI-generated content to some extent, though the exact methods they use are not fully transparent. There are many AI detection tools that we can access and test that use machine learning models to detect patterns that are typical of AI-generated content. This includes unnatural phrasing, repetition, and lack of depth or understanding, which can sometimes be characteristic of content produced by AI.
These tools are not 100% successful and can be fooled by AI content or return false positives, but we have to consider that Google’s tools will have access to more training data than other AI detectors and are likely to be more accurate.
When it comes to ChatGPT content, a lot of it is very predictable and uses the same phrases repeatedly. I regularly look at a webpage and can identify in a minute or two that it was written with ChatGPT so I’m sure Google won’t have much trouble.
This is another question I hear a lot. My guess is that this question is coming from the belief that Google is giving each piece of content an AI percentage score and there is an arbitrary pass / fail mark that we mustn’t cross. This would be similar to a plagiarism checker that identifies what percentage of a piece of content matches other existing works and how much is original. There are AI detectors used in educational contexts that do work like this, but I think it is safe to assume Google’s rating system is a lot more complex.
So we know Google can detect AI content, but does it actually matter? According to Google’s guidance about AI-generated content “Appropriate use of AI or automation is not against our guidelines.” They also say:
“Google’s ranking systems aim to reward original, high-quality content that demonstrates qualities of what we call E-E-A-T: expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. We share more about this in our How Search Works site.
Our focus on the quality of content, rather than how content is produced, is a useful guide that has helped us deliver reliable, high quality results to users for years.”
Ok, so that means AI copywriting is fair game then?
…Well hold on a minute.
If you put a simple headline into ChatGPT and ask it to create a blog post on that topic, you will see how quickly the content can be generated. And it does feel cheap and like you are cheating the system. Surely Google can’t support this?
Google has had a lot to say about AI spam. This is what Google Search Advocate John Mueller said back in 2022 about using machine learning tools to generate content:
“My suspicion is maybe the quality of content is a little bit better than the really old school tools, but for us it’s still automatically generated content, and that means for us it’s still against the Webmaster Guidelines. So we would consider that to be spam.”
He compared AI to ‘old school tools’ that allowed you to shuffle words around or inject synonyms to get around duplicate content checks.
Google’s content guidelines mentioned earlier also include an FAQ “Should I use AI to generate content?” to which they respond:
“If you see AI as an essential way to help you produce content that is helpful and original, it might be useful to consider. If you see AI as an inexpensive, easy way to game search engine rankings, then no.”
Some marketers have started to use AI to create content on an enormous scale. A recent case known as the ‘SEO heist’ went viral on X when an SEO consultant announced he had taken a competitor’s sitemap and used it to generate 1800 AI articles and ‘steal’ over 3 million views . However shortly after announcing his success the website’s traffic tanked with many speculating that Google had applied a manual penalty as a result of the post.
Churning out hundreds and thousands of auto-generated articles with the intention to steal traffic from another website would certainly go against Google’s spam policies and is the sort of practice that has the potential to result in your whole website receiving a penalty that could wipe out your search engine traffic. These penalties are very hard to come back from. This kind of AI content can definitely harm your SEO.
2024 has seen the introduction of AI Overviews in Google Search which includes an AI generated response at the top of many search results. This clearly shows that Google is not anti AI. These answers are fully automated and appearing on millions of searches a day. There have been significant issues with the early implementation, with the Overviews showing incorrect and even dangerous advice. Publishers have also raised concerns that Google is using their content without attribution.
When we hear stories like this, it is easy to develop negative opinions about the use of AI. But is its use necessarily unethical? I don’t think so. We work with a lot of small businesses and sole traders who have huge experience and expertise in their field, but they aren’t copywriters. Using ChatGPT can provide a way for them to take their high-quality, original knowledge and put it into a readable structure. When an author provides specific instructions to the chat bot that include their own expertise and then thoroughly check the output, the collaboration can be successful, quality, original content.
Read our recent article for more tips on how to use an ai to write website content and how to improve your ChatGPT prompts.
Any content that has been created using AI needs to be reviewed by a human to check it is good enough to be published. Once again Google provides us with pointers on how they rate content which we can use ourselves as part of our Quality Assurance Testing.
E-E-A-T is an acronym for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness that Google uses to evaluate the quality of websites. These are the key qualities Google is looking for that identify high-quality content and you should be reviewing all your content to look for opportunities to add more of these attributes.
Yes this is standard search engine optimisation advice but it still applies here.
If you provide this information to ChatGPT in your prompt, it usually does a pretty good job at optimising your content accordingly. It can also help in the research stage, by suggesting different search intents for your keywords, helping you identify more of what your audience are looking for so you can cover it in your content. In addition you can use ChatGPT to create Search titles and meta descriptions for your content.
AI and machine learning technology are providing more opportunities to personalise content to users in real-time.
One example of this is Google Ads, which allows you to personalise Ad headings and descriptions to include user data such as the keyword they searched, the location they are in and demographic information. This can make your content incredibly relevant to the viewer.
There are privacy concerns related to this. It requires compliant collection of first-party data, which can be done through sign-up forms, account registration, rewards for sharing data and consent platforms, but it could provide great opportunities for targeting customers with content and offers that are perfect for them.
There are already many tools that allow you to display dynamic content on your website and integration with AI will only enhance the customisation options available. If this sounds like something you’d like to explore within your site why not talk to our web development team about your requirements.
Some companies have publicly acknowledged using AI to produce web content.
Hopefully this article has given you a few tips and more confidence that AI can be used as part of your content generation as long as your content is high-quality, original and being reviewed by a human against Google’s content guidelines and your own brand values before being published.
If you have more questions about SEO or need help getting more traffic to your website give withdigital a call on 01926 330135 or send us a message today.
