Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming more prominent in digital marketing. Many AI tools help marketers complete time-consuming tasks within minutes. However, when it comes to creating content, many content creators are wondering whether AI content will help or hurt their SEO efforts. There’s no simple answer; the truth is that using AI has pros and cons, and how you use AI tools affects the results you get. In this blog, we’ll dive deep into the advantages and limitations of AI for SEO and explore some tips for using AI to create value-driven content.
What is AI-Generated Content?
AI-generated content is generated by artificial intelligence models. It could be a photo, video, text, or even audio. Put simply, any text generated by tools like ChatGPT and Gemini would be classified as AI-generated. Today, AI is being used in almost every industry.
Does AI Content Provide Any Value?
AI content does provide value; it can be created quickly and cheaply. Many businesses are beginning to use AI to generate content to save time and avoid hiring multiple writers or editors. Here are some potential benefits of creating content using AI:
Faster Content Creation
AI allows for faster content creation. It might take you hours to write a 1,000-word blog, but AI can generate one in under a minute. This frees up your content team to focus on creating ideas, brainstorming campaigns, and rethinking strategies.
Decreased Costs
Most AI tools work on a freemium model, which means that the basic version comes for free, cutting down costs. If required, you can pay a monthly subscription fee to unlock more advanced features and have AI generate more content at a fraction of the cost of hiring new team members.
Efficiency and Scalability
Artificial intelligence tools can generate more content in less time. This boosts productivity and efficiency, allowing you to save time and resources and scale your business easily. If you are a small or rapidly growing business, AI can help you meet content deadlines without devoting extensive resources to content creation.
Limitations of AI-Generated Content For SEO
While AI can be used to drive value and create content quickly and inexpensively, it has its disadvantages as well. Here are a few limitations of AI-generated content for SEO. It’s important to consider these factors before deciding to rely on AI completely for your content creation.
Inaccurate Information
Although AI tools are improving regularly, they can still provide inaccurate information or incomplete summaries. So, although you may be generating more content faster, it may be less reliable. You may end up spending more time reviewing and revising AI-generated content than you would have if you wrote it yourself.
AI Content Lacks Human Creativity & Emotion
AI tools often generate content that feels robotic and awkward. While you can train tools through elaborate prompts, this may undermine the efficiency of the tools. The lack of human creativity and emotion in AI-generated content makes it less effective. Your audience may be able to tell that you used AI. This may cause your business to lose credibility, decreasing conversion rates.
AI Content Lacks Originality
AI tools often generate answers that have repetitive words or sentence structures. Additionally, AI tools may generate similar content for multiple users. That is why AI-generated content often causes plagiarism issues.
Requires Monitoring
Content generated by AI requires monitoring and verification, which may mean more work instead of less, depending on content volume and accuracy. Using AI to generate content that has to be fact-checked or rewritten may actually slow your content creation process down.
Limited Understanding of Context
Some AI tools have a limited ability to understand the context of certain prompts or topics. In certain industries, AI tools will not be as useful or accurate. For example, healthcare websites must be especially careful about using AI content because search engines will not rank their content if it is completely accurate.
Plagiarism Problems
AI tools utilize crawling and indexing techniques to pull content from other websites. The content that AI generates for you may be similar, or even identical, to content on other websites. This means that using content generated by AI can cause plagiarism issues.
Lack of Accountability
AI can generate fake and misleading content, including fake reviews, deepfakes, and fake news. If you accidentally use misleading content generated by AI, your credibility and rankings will suffer. This may cause you to lose loyal customers or potential leads.
Algorithms Devalue Content
If you use AI-generated content, search algorithms may devalue it, which hurts your rankings and visibility. While using AI to generate topic ideas, titles, or outlines, or even review content for grammar mistakes, might speed up your process, using AI to completely replace human writing may hurt your website in the long run.
Lack of Personalization
Every brand has a unique voice, tone, and personality. If you use AI to generate content for your brand, you may lose your brand’s unique essence. That is because AI often generates content that lacks personalization, and the responses may be repetitive and unoriginal.
Tips for Using AI Tools
The cons of AI-generated content significantly outweigh the pros. However, if you think AI can really benefit you, here are some tips for using AI tools:
Use the Right AI Content Tools
There are various AI tools available in the market. Each of these tools is designed for a specific function. You can’t do everything on one platform. For writing, ChatGPT and Gemini are among the most popular. But if you need help generating images and videos, Firefly, Midjourney, Dall-E, and Runway are recommended. Find the AI tools designed specifically for your business goals or industry in order to use AI effectively.
Use AI to Boost Your SEO Efforts
If you are using AI specifically for SEO, you should know that AI is not a replacement for SEO expertise. However, it can only streamline your process and boost your efforts. Some effective AI tools for SEO include SurferSEO for on-page optimization, MarketMuse for content strategy, and Grammarly AI Writing Assistant to polish your content.
Quality Assurance Checks
AI tools can be unreliable and generate incomplete or even inaccurate content. You also cannot trust AI tools with grammar because some tools tend to use slang or informal language, depending on how you’ve used them previously or how the AI model has collected the data. That is why quality assurance plays a big role in effectively using AI for SEO. Every AI-generated piece of content should be properly reviewed for quality before you publish it.
Use AI to Identify Content Opportunities
While it’s true that AI cannot single-handedly perform SEO for you, it can help you brainstorm ideas and identify content opportunities. AI tools can help you generate blog post ideas, recommend external websites for guest posting, create content outlines, and even find internal linking opportunities.
Level Up Your Content Creation and Marketing With Outpace
AI might be able to quickly generate content, but it’s nowhere near as effective as an expert SEO team. If you are looking for a team of specialists who can revamp your content strategy and optimize your website to rank on the first page of Google, Outpace can help. We’ve been in this industry for over 12 years and have helped hundreds of businesses gain more visibility, drive more traffic, and earn more revenue. Schedule a free consultation today.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Google is not completely against AI-generated content, but it does emphasize high-quality content that provides value to users. Content that is relevant, informative, and original will always rank well, regardless of how it was created. The problem is that AI-generated content often lacks originality and expertise, which can be harmful for your brand. That is why it’s important to be vigilant about AI-generated content and perform proper quality assurance checks before you publish it.
AI-generated content is harmful if you depend on it too much or do not verify its accuracy and quality. AI can generate text, but the fact-checking, creative strategy, and content development should be done by humans who are actually experts in your field. Trusting AI to do the heavy lifting for you can result in plagiarized, spammy content, which may be flagged by Google.
No, Google does not automatically penalize AI-generated content. But Google can detect content that is spammy, plagiarized, and lacks value; things that are often seen in AI-generated content. If you are not careful about how you use AI, you may end up hurting your own rankings.
You can use AI-generated content in your SEO strategy, but it may make your content less effective and hurt your rankings. Overreliance on AI-generated content may be a waste of your resources because it likely will not generate significant results long-term.
