Is AI Content Viable for Competitive SEO?
It is early 2023, and seemingly the majority of professional SEOs and marketers are talking about ChatGPT, AI “generated” images, and AI content.
Many successful content marketers seem to believe that language modeling machines and content generated from scraped datasets are going to make SEO more difficult for everyone.
I’m not so convinced of that hypothesis, and I might be bold enough to say that original content created from human insight could stand out more in this scenario.
The points in the article I made in a September 2020 video, but I wanted to re-share these thoughts. It seems like these concepts might be more relevant than ever.
Why Do Many Marketers Want AI Content to be Viable for Content Creation?
Let’s talk candidly. Many individual marketers and agencies do not want to spend money on hiring competent humans to create content. People in this category are hoping that ChatGPT and StableDiffusion are viable alternative to hiring content writers and artists, respectively. Their dream is to make more money by eliminating human research, writing, creativity, art, and point-of-view.
I know many people who already believe that AI content will be able to create content that is indistinguishable from human content. They erroneously believe that both search engines like Google, and human beings will be unable to tell the difference. This is where I predict that the AI content enthusiast will be proven wrong.
While I do believe there is a place for machine learning tools and language modeling, I don’t believe that creating content for competitive SEO is the place for AI.
Contemplating the Google Ranking Algorithm
While the Google ranking algorithm is a combination of many factors, which not even any single Google engineer understands in full, the intent is to choose content which best satisfies searchers, for each search query.
The real question is, “How will Google know which articles should rank at the top? Should it be AI created content? Or should it be something written by a human?” And in the context of this question, I think it’s implied, “How does Google know who’s an expert? Will Google be able to tell what content is most useful? And what is expertly written?”
This becomes exponentially important when it comes to websites that fall under the Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) designation. These are pages with content that can affect your health, finances, happiness, personal safety, and well-being. This can include many different topics, if you think about it in any depth.
Is AI really up to the task of creating content which adequately answers questions which can affect your future health, well-being, financial stability, housing, or happiness?
If you understand how language modeling, predictive text, and content datasets work, you would be wise to trust a human subject matter expert over ChatGPT in these instances.
How Does Google Decide What Should Rank Highest?
Keywords, site content, page content, and other signals help Google determine a set of pages that are eligible to rank for certain keywords. But how does it determine, over a period of time, which pages should rank highest for certain searches?
It’s not enough to rely on common words and phrases alone. There must be other signals, which are difficult (if not impossible) to replicate easily, which provide reasonable proof that users find a specific page satisfying.
Links from trustworthy websites within an industry category can be one factor that fits this criteria. Certain websites are run by organizations that have been around for decades or even centuries in the offline world. Earning links from sites such as these would be something that not every website could achieve.
Google also must be able to track the behavior of searchers without relying on tools like Google Analytics. Only about half the websites on Earth have Google Analytics installed, so there must be reliable methods for tracking user behavior on all websites.
Then, there should be certain actions or criteria which indicate satisfaction with the content on a page. By measuring this over time, Google (and possibly Bing) can figure out whether users are happy with a page, and then that page should rank higher.
So the question you need to answer is, would a human being find AI content more satisfying than content created by a human expert, an organization with original research, or a content creator with a unique insight on a topic?
AI Content Can Amplify Ugly Biases
This fact was true in 2020, it’s still true in 2023 — ChatGPT can add bigoted views into content.
Language modeling systems try to figure out what words belong next to one another. Because machine learning does not have human discernment, it can add negative bias, creating unfortunate results. There are several studies which show ChatGPT persistently links Muslims to violence when creating content. A December 2022 article also showed that ChatGPT could be prompted into creating racist and eugenic content rather easily.
The issue is language modeling tools like ChatGPT are trained on datasets that also contain human biases that can be racist, sexist, misogynist, and xenophobic. These despicable biases can be inadvertently passed directly into the content it generates.
For that reason alone, I would not advise that you use AI content generators on any type of business website. The potential risk is far too great to take a chance.
It is Safest to Rely on Earned Expertise
There are definitely some flaws with ChatGPT generated content, such as inaccuracy, unintentional bias, and flat-out bland writing. For the foreseeable future, I don’t see ChatGPT being able to consistently outrank well-researched content created by a human expert. Add to the issues listed above, the fact that most of the leading language modeling experts are already working at Google, I’m fairly confident that Google can detect the majority of ChatGPT generated written content. Whether human searchers find it more useful than the rest of the content it competes against, that is another story.
Still, I’m putting my chips on human expertise for the immediate future. I believe that human experience and the perspective that provides is still far more valuable than remixed content. People are still going to follow certain authors and certain sites that they trust.
