Does AI Generated Content Really Hurt Your SEO Rankings?
Recently, I’ve had lots of people telling me that “AI generated content hurts SEO rankings” and that marketers should avoid using AI while content creation.
I don’t fully agree.
And I have the perfect example to show you what all those people are missing out while saying what they say.
A little bit of background information about me: I didn’t study marketing in college, I didn’t study literature, and I didn’t study economics or I didn’t study management.
I didn’t study anything close to marketing.
I studied translation and interpreting studies. And I, myself, didn’t realize how close those two things were connected until I spent years in the marketing job that I have now.
How is marketing similar to translation?
1- AI and machine learning scared us
When I was in college, Google Translate had just started to produce good quality translations, and the walkie-talkie-like audio translators had just been released. This is even before Duolingo became widely popular.
And so, we were scared to death that we were studying for nothing, and that machines were going to replace us.
Our professors kept telling us that “machines could only to dechnical translation, and we would always be needed for literary translation” etc.
But I hated doing literary translations. I’m not into literature and I definitely cannot translate poems or so.
This was until one day in one class, a guest speaker who actually worked in the field came up and said “no one is replacing no one, on the contrary, now that translation is widely accessible, we need post-editors more than ever”.
Ps: post editing is the process of humanizing the machine translation output.
It made sense, and COVID only proved the guest speaker right.
In fact, I wrote about the importance of localization in one of my previous posts.
All in all, machines did not only make translators’ jobs faster and easier, but they also made it possible for more companies to benefit from localization and internationalization advantages.
Which brings me to my next point:
2- AI and machine learning made our jobs easier
So yes, what we feared as our worst enemy turned out to be our best friend and career partner (I’m still talking about Google translate).
I never turned in a 100% authentic translation assignment after that day. I always edited what Google Translate gave me to my liking, and the 4 hour assignment would be done in an hour.
Getting back to AI, the exact same thing could happen for content writers and marketers, actually.
I always see two types of people:
- Those who think that AI is bad for SEO,
- And those who fear that AI is going to replace content writers by next year.
But why does no one ever consider getting help from AI to generate content ideas and come over the writers block?
I love creating content and seeing results, I really enjoy doing research and putting together a high quality piece of content so that everyone can benefit from it.
But I absolutely hate doing keyword research, and sometimes, I just wish I was a junior content writer so that I didn’t have to go through the burden of finding topics to write about every single week.
Now, I simply use AI.
Is ChatGPT the first AI content tool to ever exist?
NO!
It isn’t even a content tool. It’s just a dialogue AI, like Apple’s Siri, but in written format and a bit more capable.
AI has been around in the content marketing area for a long time.
Well, for a few years, at least.
I remember using Jarvis AI in 2022 and being absolutely blown away by how humanlike it is.
Looking back now, I see that Jarvis isn’t anywhere near ChatGPT. Now, I can clearly identify a text written by Jarvis, because it has certain patterns that it doesn’t overrule.
No wonder Google’s algorithm can detect AI while even I can detect some.
But the case with ChatGPT is a bit more different.
It has the capability to revise and edit the content it created based on your demands.
Here is an example:
This is what the tool wrote for my based on my question, and below is how it responded to my request:
I don’t know about Google’s algorithm, but I wouldn’t be able to differentiate this content from one that was written by a human.
So, does AI hurt SEO rankings or not?
It could, if you used all the raw material that the AI provided.
Not editing it, not adding images and statistics that you found, and not leveraging it up to a higher quality could absolutely hurt your hard-earned SEO rankings.
But this doesn’t mean that you have to keep doing everything manually.
I don’t blame my Iphone-using friends for asking Siri to set an alarm instead of manually doing it.
I won’t blame you for asking AI to help you with:
- Generating content ideas,
- Finding headers and titles,
- Getting help to get over writers block,
- Creating templates and briefs,
- Telling you what to do.
So be smart and don’t ask AI to do everything for you. Not yet, at least. But definitely do benefit from the ease that it provides.
