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When was the last time you asked yourself, “Is that AI or is it real?” If you spend any time on the internet, it was probably within the last day or two. The lines between artificial and real content are becoming increasingly blurred, and this is especially true in the SEO world. While the SEO landscape was already heavily impacted by AI tools that could be used to automate workflows and perform technical optimisations, the rapid growth of generative AI tools is raising questions for website owners.
The appeal of AI-generated content is obvious; it appears to allow SEO teams to instantly create customised content. Rather than spending time editing and adjusting content, content creators can use AI tools to adjust the content’s tone, length, and format simply by changing the prompt. AI content tools have allowed companies to hire fewer writers and editors and produce a higher volume of content faster than before. With all these benefits, AI content generation is hard to resist.
Although AI-generated content might seem like a win-win solution in today’s fast-paced digital world, it comes with several risks that can significantly affect SEO success. Google has maintained its emphasis on E-E-A-T, which stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Using AI-generated content can undermine your brand’s E-E-A-T because it is often generic and may only scratch a topic’s surface, especially if your website exists in a specialised industry.
Duplicate content: Search engines prioritise unique content when they are choosing websites to rank or cite in AI search engine answers. If you use AI to generate content, you have no way of knowing whether your content is unique. In fact, your competitors may be using similar prompts and keywords, resulting in content that appears to be duplicated or plagiarised. Additionally, AI content generation tools tend to employ similar vocabulary and sentence structure, no matter the topic. This means that your page will have a high degree of similarity to other AI-generated content, even if the topic is unique. This may result in a drop in your site rankings since it undermines your site’s authority and originality.
Hallucinated facts: AI hallucinations are a recent phenomenon that, while they often seem humorous, can actually be dangerous for companies and users who rely on AI tools. Hallucinated facts occur when AI tools “hallucinate” connections, facts, or patterns that are inaccurate or nonsensical. AI tools have been known to make up facts, incorrectly identify content as AI-generated, and even invent legal cases that never occurred. Sometimes, the errors are more subtle and have to do with tone or context; for example, an article referred to a food bank as a “tourist hotspot.” Clearly, using AI to generate content comes with risks. At the very least, it’s important to have human editors reviewing AI content to make sure that it is accurate and appropriate for your brand.
Brand tone dilution: Although generative AI has become more sophisticated and can adjust its tone somewhat, it still cannot provide the unique voice and variation that comes with original content. To stand out from the competition, it is crucial for businesses to maintain their own brand. When creating content, this includes how writers handle elements such as vocabulary, sentence structure, industry terms, sense of humour, regional terminology, and more. While AI may be able to accommodate some of these customisations, you’ll likely end up with generic content similar to the content generated by your competitors. Users will likely be able to identify familiar words and thought patterns found in other AI content. When AI content dilutes your brand tone, users and search engines will be less likely to engage with your content, leading to a drop in rankings, conversions, and brand recognition.
These risks do not mean that website creators should avoid AI altogether. At Outpace SEO, we frequently use AI tools to streamline tasks like keyword research, technical SEO, workflow management, and rank tracking. However, we exercise caution when it comes to content tools and base our strategy on Google’s published guidelines about the type of content it pays attention to.
Google has consistently prioritised content quality over the content creation process. Content created by AI with the primary purpose of affecting rankings is considered spam and violates Google’s policies. While AI content is not automatically rejected, Google and other search engines evaluate E-E-A-T, helpfulness, and originality to determine which content is considered high quality. The most successful SEO campaigns use AI content to assist with high-quality content creation without undermining their own efforts through generic, inaccurate content. For example, at Outpace SEO, we use AI tools to help us identify content gaps, generate outlines, and check for grammatical errors, but we focus on unique, human-generated content to provide each client with results. This hybrid approach allows us to create a significant volume of compelling content.
Staying up to date with AI tools without losing originality and brand identity is a difficult balance for businesses to strike in today’s world. By focusing on high-quality content and streamlined workflows, website creators can develop efficient SEO campaigns that promote visibility and help their content stand out.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Summit Ghimire is the founder of Outpace, an SEO agency that helps national and enterprise businesses exceed their revenue goals. His passion for SEO and business growth comes from successful campaigns working with hundreds of clients across verticals.
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