Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a trending topic everywhere, helping people in various sectors, from healthcare to digital marketing. In the digital marketing world, on one hand, it has made tasks easier for writers of any domain but has raised many questions too. SEO is a prominent method of bringing organic traffic to the website and increasing leads. However, with the rise of AI-Generated Content, the focus on quality content with a human touch has vanished.

This raises the question of whether search engine algorithms consider AI content genuine and authentic or not. In the last 2 years, there have been many speculations and debates about the same, and Google’s concerned people have given various statements on it. According to them, completely AI-Generated copy-paste content violates their guidelines and is harmful to SEO. But as technologies are made to be used, AI content is not illegal, but there are certain things that an AI writer has to take care of.

Debates And Statements for AI-Generated Content

In April 2022, there was a debate in Google Search Central SEO Community about whether AI-Generated content is ideal for SEO or not. Google’s search Advocate John Mueller during April 2022 debate about AI-Generated content, spoke against the topic and claimed that AI-generated content is spam. This raises the question of whether Google is going to accept such content or not. John Mueller not only made this statement but also sarcastically slammed many people on Twitter asking whether they can use ChatGPT for content writing or not.

Check one of his replies to a user asking whether they can use ChatGPT for publishing content now, as it gives 80% original content. To this, “John Mueller replied, “It’s like a food having 20% toxic chemicals. Sounds tasty? There are many such instances where he showed his viewpoint against the topic. According to him, AI-generated content is automated content that violates the guidelines of Google Webmasters. Finally, he concludes his argument with the statement “AI-generated content is fine until a writer checks its authenticity and is not meant for manipulating search engine rankings”.

Earlier, Google had a guideline to avoid any kind of automatically generated content. However, Google updated this guideline by adding the words “intended to manipulate search engine rankings.” This gave an explicit right to writers to generate content using AI Tools, but maintaining relevance and quality will be the critical factors. If they find low-quality content that is just meant for search engine rankings and does not provide any value to the readers, immediate action will be taken against such websites. This negatively affects your SEO, causing a blunder for your website.

Is AI-Generated Content Bad for SEO?

After the debate, it entirely depends on how you are using it and to what extent.

AI-generated content is harmful to SEO if:

• Not proofread and edited properly to rectify all the grammatical and vocabulary errors.

• Factual accuracy is not cross-checked with some authentic source and raw content is directly published from ChatGPT.

• The main intent of the content is to manipulate search engine rankings, not to provide value or information to readers.

Therefore, if the content is written with the utmost care and high-quality data that can provide value to the reader and solves a certain query, AI-generated content can work as a booster for SEO.

Advantages of AI-Generated Content for SEO

Although the human mind can never be replaced by Artificial intelligence, the value a human can provide AI cannot. Still, some benefits of AI can be used to make work faster and easier.

Increase Efficiency

AI can easily produce a large amount of information and create fresh content for you in less time. This allows marketers and writers to target better keywords, create more content, and target multiple channels for publishing content. The frequency of posts increases, ultimately bringing search engine spiders to the website frequently. If the content is well written and can resonate with your audience, there are chances of indexing which increase the website rankings.

Fast and Easy

AI can generate any type of content, whether blogs, product descriptions, email structure, landing page content, or social media posts, in seconds. Along with content, AI has the ability to create SEO-friendly headlines, meta titles, descriptions, and snippets. A proper prompt is enough for AI to create the type of content you want. It analyses the user’s needs, examines the information on that particular topic, and delivers the best possible results. This makes a writer’s work easy as they get full-fledged content without much effort. Also, this provides quick results and saves resources that can be used for other business purposes.

An Affordable Tool

Some AI tools are free, whereas the rest are available at minimal costs. Compared to professional content writers who charge nearly $200 to $500 and freelancers who charge between Rs $30-$40 hourly, AI tools are a more affordable alternative. AI tools are available at a cost of somewhere between $30 to $100 per month. However, even AI tools have many technicalities and specifications which are challenging to understand. Therefore, many writers are trying to master the AI tools by understanding the writing pattern, structure, and sentences they use.

Keyword Research

Writers invest a lot of time in keyword research tools to find appropriate keywords for a specific topic. Conversely, AI can access numerous websites writing about the same topic as yours and locate their targeted keywords. It examines the top-performing keywords among them and gives you a list of those. By using this data, writers can generate high-quality content revolving around those keywords, which ultimately helps to increase search engine rankings.

Solves Writer’s Block

Writer’s block is a common problem writers face, especially for technical topics about which they have limited knowledge. Getting a word limit of even 3000 words is frustrating in that situation. Sitting in front of the screen, reading multiple blogs, and getting nothing is something that negatively affects a writer’s mindset. In such a situation, thinking of new ideas, words, or content becomes difficult. However, with the help of AI, any type of content can be written within minutes. AI tools can provide an excellent outline for the topic and key points that can make content writing easy. Additionally, merely adding a keyword can give you hundreds of topics revolving around it. This opens a plethora of new and unique concepts to write about.

Drawbacks of AI-Generated Content for SEO

As every coin has two sides, every technology comes with some drawbacks. The same goes for artificial intelligence regarding lack of human touch, accuracy, common sense, emotions, etc. Along with some advantages, it has some disadvantages too; if neglected, it can cause harm to your website and online presence.

Lack of Human Touch

AI can evolve in everything, but getting human elements is still difficult. AI content sounds robotic and lacks creativity, emotions, personalization, and nuance, which degrades the quality of content. AI cannot create a story to target the emotions and sentiments of the people, which we call human psychology. No matter the services you sell, targeting human minds and making them connect with your brand is essential. AI-generated content can provide immense knowledge, but when it comes to creativity, storytelling, real-life examples, common-sense, imagination, assumptions, statements, and conclusions, it is still not at par with the human mind.

It cannot understand the intent of a query and may come up with generic information available on other websites. It lacks human elements such as sarcasm, irony, satire, debate, examples, emotions, and humor, mainly the elements that make the content more engaging, readable, and user-friendly. Writers can mold content that fits best with the person reading it and his mindset. But AI lacks human knowledge and may sound robotic; that lacks creativity. Some topics that need complete human touch are impossible to be written using AI.

Factual Inaccuracy and Plagiarism

AI tools generally scan some websites and provide a copy of content based on that in a unique manner. However, AI tools sometimes provide inaccurate information from low-quality websites that may hamper your potential readers. It even sometimes just picks up some words and makes a sentence without understanding the context of the actual sentence. It sometimes completely picks off content from a particular website with minor word changes.

The words called synonyms even change the meaning of the sentence. As AI cannot understand the context, merely exchanging with the synonym is a big issue that writers face. Reading each and every line and editing the content becomes even more difficult than writing. Copy-pasted content contains plagiarism which causes a violation of the search engine guidelines causing the devaluation of your website. Incorrect responses called hallucinations are a problem existing in even the latest version of ChatGPT.

Repetition of sentences

Another disadvantage of AI-written content is the repetition of content and its meaning. People who have used the most popular AI tool – ChatGPT have claimed they have faced the issue of repetition of complete sentences. When you ask about the intro about a particular topic, it will provide information by collecting it from various websites. But that same information is used throughout the content, which causes the repetition of sentences.

The most observed example of this is a similarity in content for a blog’s intro and conclusion sections. If not checked and corrected, this repetition of sentences can come under the category of content spinning and repetition, which is basically a black hat SEO technique. Such techniques not only negatively impact a reader, but even search engines lower the rankings of your website. Repetition of such errors can negatively impact your business’s online visibility.

Limited data or information

The biggest drawback of some tools is the lack of information about trending news or trends prevailing in the market. You cannot expect ChatGPT to write absolutely new information on a topic that is not written by any other website. This limits the thought of writing unique and never written content as AI has no information about it. Moreover, ChatGPT has information till September 2021, making it useless for people who write on genres such as news, sports, fashion, general awareness, etc.

It even cannot fetch data from other websites if they have the information. When you try to search about an ongoing event, for example, “Schedule of IPL 2023,” it would not provide you with the desired answer. Instead, you will get an overview of IPL and its selection. All this is due to already-filled data beyond which AI tools cannot go. However, just like any other technology, AI is also in its updation stage, and every new version is solving these limitations one by one.

Cannot provide information on Certain Topics

AI tools are designed in such a way that they cannot provide information about specific topics that violate their already-fetched data or are outside that boundary. Such topics include real-time events, opinions, confidential information, violence-related topics, future predictions, medical advice, beauty tips, dangerous experiments, explicit content, financial advice, etc. There is a wide range of such topics that are not within AI’s range, but a human writer can write any topic with an understanding of search intent. Imagine having a financial advisory firm – you cannot expect AI tools to write content for such topics as they may be at risk of being inaccurate, harmful, and lacking practicality. This can harm your firm’s reputation, and you may have to face serious consequences. Only a writer with the required financial knowledge can write content for you.

Conclusion

In conclusion, AI-generated content in the SEO context has both advantages and disadvantages. Although it can boost productivity, save time and resources, helps in keyword research, and assist in overcoming writer’s block, it also has drawbacks in the form of lack of human touch, factually inaccurate, repeated sentences, etc. Therefore, instead of concentrating exclusively on manipulating search engine rankings, AI should be utilised to help writers produce high-quality material that adds value for readers.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q1. What is AI Generated content?

AI-generated content means content that is not written by a human writer but by artificial intelligence and automation. Tools such as ChatGPT and Copy.ai are top AI content-writing tools.

Q2. Is it possible to get higher rankings with AI-written content?

Yes, but there are some conditions or guidelines that Google has provided in respect of AI-written content. The content should be factually checked, not meant solely for rankings, and must have some value to provide to visitors.

Q3. Is AI content plagiarism free?

To some extent yes, AI does not completely copy-paste the content. It analyses the topic on some websites and based on that creates a piece of original content. However, there are always chances of the content spinning, word exchanges, and wrong information as it cannot understand the context of the content.

Q4. Can AI content replace human-written content?

No, till now it's impossible for AI to replace human content due to limitations such as lack of accuracy, human touch, creativity, humor, personalization, real-life examples, and many more. What a human writer can add to the content, AI writing tools are still struggling with.