100DOSEO #8
Bored of Yandex now, back to AI generated content...
Well, that was a crazy week. But back to looking at AI-generated content.
I won’t bore you with the latest crazy growth metrics here, but we can safely say that ChatGPT has broken another growth record whilst you’ve been reading this.
So, you could be forgiven for feeling the temptation to look at running all your content briefs through AI tools.
So tempting, in fact that OpenAI (the creators of ChatGPT) have released their own tool for identifying AI-generated content.
You might have seen the recent news then that some sites are not just doing this but actively labelling their AI-generated content on their site.
So what do we do as SEOs? Should we cave to this highly efficient way of producing content or stick to our purist roots and write everything ourselves?
How to (possibly) make AI content work
So what should you consider if you are going to be looking at getting into the AI content game?
Well, in my opinion AI-generated content isn’t entirely off the table. To understand this, I want to talk about the three things that should be in place before it is even considered:
The content is reviewed and edited by a human (old school, I know)
The banknote example caveats its AI-generated label with the notion that the content has been reviewed by a real person with real credentials. How lovely.
I’m not sure whether this will open the door to some AI-E-A-T debate, but expert’s name attributed to a piece, even if for editing purposes, would surely be a positive signal.
So my first recommendation, no matter how tempting and time-saving it will be, is to thoroughly fact-check, edit and revise AI-generated content.
Copy and paste jobs will not be high quality enough. And they will be easily detectable anyway.
Your domain is already considered an authority on the topic that you want to produce more content on
The only domains that I have seen that publicly announce their content is AI generated have been around for a while.
They have built strong backlinks to their sites.
Building your AI-generated content empire on a fresh domain could be a much riskier proposition.
Of course, this isn’t entirely risk-free. It could be that the weight of the backlink profile and trustworthiness outweigh any penalties for using suspected AI-generated content.
But my hypothesis is that if you lean on that first point (content being manually reviewed and edited) as well as the next point, you’ll be in a much better place.
The content is solving a clear intent-based search query
After testing a little with some of these AI tools, I noticed that the AI performed a lot better when it had a clear question to answer. It works even better when you can provide it with the question and the answer because then it becomes more of a write-up job.
But looking at some of the content on Bankrate that uses AI generation, you can see this clear pattern of matching a clear search intent.
If you are writing content that is an opinion or more open-ended, then AI will struggle.
Sure, it might give you 2000 words, but what is the content saying if you dig into it? Is it making an interesting point, or is it just saying not a lot with a lot of content?
Clear prompts with clear boundaries are the best suited. Bonus points if you’ve already thought about what you want the content to say.
Takeaways
To be extremely clear - I am not condoning using AI to create your content. But the opportunity is there for us to create content quicker.
Would this content be better? Well, in some cases, with good prompts and a transparent review process, why not?
The problem is - will search engines see AI-generated content as helpful if it can be verified as written by AI?
We don’t know of an update currently targeting good AI-generated content.
We do know that GPT-4 is supposedly going to drop later this year.
My takeaway is that this is definitely worth a try on a domain that isn’t your prized possession.
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Are you looking for SEO help? Just a quick note to say that I’m currently taking on a few new clients. You can reach out to me at james@seotagg.com if you want me to take a personal look at your site/project.
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