Artificial intelligence (AI) has taken the world by storm within the last year. From ChatGPT to Bard, there are countless tools available in the market, giving marketers a faster and much easier way to create content. But how does it affect your SEO? How does using AI copy and content affect your rankings?
Does Google support AI content? Is using AI content beneficial for search rankings? Well, Google’s policies regarding AI-generated content have been erratic, and the company has claimed to have algorithms that can identify and penalize AI copy.
Until recently, most SEO professionals understood that overtly leveraging AI content for ranking could be a dangerous tactic, bordering on black hat SEO.
However, Google has become lenient in reaction to ChatGPT and other LLMs (large language models). AI material might not violate Google’s policies as long as it is created with human benefit in mind. – words of John Mueller, Google On the contrary, we still think AI has numerous limitations, and so we have decided to take a negative stance on AI for SEO.
Limitations of AI-Generated Content for SEO
Large language models, which are systems built to comprehend and generate human language, are the foundation of AI technologies like ChatGPT. In short, the system collects information from millions of sources, finds patterns in the data, and then uses that knowledge to generate answers.
To put it another way, AI uses information that already exists. AI-generated content won’t offer new ideas or notions. Rather, it will be based on knowledge that already exists, which is extremely valuable. Additionally, there is a risk of plagiarism.
Additionally, content produced by AI may be erroneous, deceptive, and have poor syntax and grammar. AI tools employ algorithms to generate content, therefore they might produce content that isn’t helpful or relevant to your target audience.
It’s never a smart idea to let AI handle all the work by itself, even though it can speed up the content-writing process. Both humans and search engines can readily identify fully generated AI content. And therefore, it is important to humanize the content generated by AI tools.
1. Data-Driven Guesses
Most AI content generation tools when given a prompt, typically just predict (using a ton of sample data) what word should appear next in a sentence. This implies that the quality of the underlying data determines how good the solution is. Additionally, data may be more sparse on particular subjects, producing outputs that are less accurate or dependable.
2. A Risky Liability for Businesses
For many businesses, AI content may come as a liability. Businesses are held accountable when an AI makes a claim about a service or product they sell and the company publishes the information. Editorial review, fact-checking, and other procedures can help fix some mistakes, but they probably won’t catch them all. And to be honest, why not start with human-generated content in the first place, considering the amount of time that can be spent on a comprehensive review process?
3. Fluff Rather Than Beneficial Information
Why do you write content? Of course to produce something useful for the people when they search for a particular term on the search engines. Even Google wants to ensure that a specific individual with a specific inquiry at a specific moment would benefit from the search results. And therefore, the SEO professionals algorithm-proof the content they write.
The statistical odds of what word will appear next produce fluff instead of useful information for people. The potential utility of a website to users will decrease if it relies heavily on content generated by artificial intelligence.
4. Inaccurate Outputs
Next, if LLMs use the internet to consume content that informs their next-gen versions and the internet becomes home for AI-generated content, it will be like AI informing another AI what human content looks like. This cwill cause the AI to continuously generate erroneous and extreme results throughout several generations of testing and deployment. Again, not reliable!
5. Threat to Quality Content
The amount of AI-generated content available online has probably increased dramatically due to the popularity of ChatGPT and other platforms, which presents an existential risk to the quality of AI-generated content.
As a result, the value of human-generated content will rise, particularly if it can more clearly demonstrate human involvement. Last but not least, Google can’t manually assess every piece of AI material to determine whether or not it is helpful to people; this requires human involvement, and editorial review costs money. Google will therefore be dependent on automation. Google is probably going to release guidelines on how to distinguish between content created by AI and content created by humans. Additionally, even supposedly human-generated content will probably need to pass a number of sniff tests.
Unidentified AI content is likely to face penalty because it will be simpler to attribute its use to malicious intent. In the way it handles links, Google has modeled this kind of devaluation or penalty already. Links and AI content differ greatly in that links don’t need special permission to be published on your website.
What is AI Content Good for?
By obtaining pertinent data, statistics, and even quotes, artificial intelligence (AI) can assist in the generation of content ideas. Knowing how to write excellent prompts is therefore essential. The AI will be able to produce greater ideas and information for you if you enter better prompts.
However, never assume that an AI-generated response is accurate. Although the tool helps with planning and serves as a shortcut, it is not the ultimate solution. Because even the most advanced AI content generators can produce inaccurate material.
Fact-checking is essential. Although remarkable, tools like ChatGPT are frequently incorrect. Verify the accuracy of all the output generated by the tool. You can use tools like ZeroGPT or other similar tools to detect AI content and make the necessary tweaks
Conclusion
To restate, because Google’s position on AI-generated material can change, we do not support using it for your website. Anything you post on your website must pass an AI detection test. To reduce the possibility of future penalties if Google subsequently cracks down on content created by artificial intelligence, you should only publish this on an indexed webpage if it passes.
If you plan to experiment with AI-generated content, start with pages that are less important and have a lower hierarchy in the site structure just to be safe. Write a little blog post to test it out. Now is not the right time to rewrite your homepage using AI.
