Why you shouldn’t let AI run your SEO
AI can help to streamline your SEO but without a human element, you’re leaving your brand open to risk. Larissa Thorne explains how to harness the machines and the importance of an AI sandwich.
While ChatGPT has put artificial intelligence (AI) in the spotlight like never before, in reality, AI has been powering marketing efforts for quite some time. And one place it’s fast become the go-to resource is search engine optimisation (SEO).
Across the industry, we’re seeing a slowdown and shift in budgets that is driving more and more SEO work to be passed on to AI.
But before you call in the machines, it pays to consider the risks.
AI has the power to automate time-consuming and repetitive tasks freeing us up to enhance our work and focus on the craft itself. And this is true for SEO. But the real impact of AI on SEO is yet to be felt. And there will be ramifications when it is.
Right now, Google doesn’t care who creates your content as long as it is original and high quality. To bring up a search result, you need to tick four boxes for Google: experience, expertise, authenticity and trust.
You can use content generators to create editorial articles that deliver to these benchmarks.
But once everyone is using the same content generators to create the same content or target the same keywords, we’re going to get a lack of originality. Not only is that going to make it tricky for your brand to get cut through, but at some point, Google is going shift its algorithm to compensate.
We’ve seen it happen before with the rise of Black Hat SEO.
Black Hat SEO refers to increasing a site or page’s rank in search engines using practices that violate the search engine’s terms of service. Essentially, it involves tricking the algorithm. It peaked around 2015, when websites were stuffing keywords into a brick of copy that made little to no sense.
Black Hat SEO destroyed the experience of using many websites because you couldn’t find what you were looking for. Instead, you got horrible information.
To compensate for that, Google updated its algorithm. The new, more sophisticated approach meant that rather than looking for a simple keyword, searches took into consideration the intention of what the person was searching for. This helped us to once again find the most relevant answer.
While it won’t happen immediately, this is where issues are going to surface down the track when outsourcing your SEO to AI. Make no mistake, Google’s algorithm will change again and if you’re relying on AI, you’re going to need to change tack.
If you go all in on content generators to fuel your SEO strategy, that’s not the only risk you need to look out for.
By design, AI-generated content is derivative. It is created using content that already exists. So there’s no way for you to actually get anything original out of AI. It’s a Frankenstein of other people’s thoughts.
Has it been completely rewritten or is it simply copied and pasted from somewhere else? You have no way of knowing whether you’re plagiarising – or more accurately, the level to which you’re plagiarising. If your business is in a high-risk industry for legal issues such as banking or insurance, you’re leaving yourself open to enormous risk.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t use AI.
Content marketers have long been using it in other ways and delivering noticeable efficiencies.
But it should really be an AI “sandwich” where humans are the bread and AI is the meat.
We should come in at the beginning with human thought: planning the content, thinking about the prompts and the different ways that we can make something that’s unique. Then hand it over to the AI. We also need people on the other end of the system to edit the content ensuring its accuracy and distinctiveness. We need varying degrees of human touch points to achieve tonality in terms of brand voice.
Much like how Wikipedia is a great place for your research to start but a terrible place for it to end, it’s the same with AI. Everything has its place.
The amount of content that we’ve been creating and putting on the internet has grown significantly year-on-year and since AI has come into the picture, that output has increased exponentially. Experts now predict 90 per cent of online content will be AI-generated by 2026.
If we’re not careful, we’re going to end up with millions of articles on the same topic and it’s not going to have a positive impact on your business, in terms of SEO or otherwise.
Larissa Thorne is the Director of Digital & Content at Keep Left.
