Is AI Content Bad for SEO? It's Complicated..

Here we are in the middle of the AI revolution and I keep hearing the same thing: ‘AI content is bad for SEO’ - ‘Google won’t rank your content if it’s AI generated’- ‘No-one wants to read AI generated content as it’s too generic’.

Lets’s get one thing out of the way here. I’m an SEO professional and a content manager for hire, and I’m a HUGE fan of AI content.

And, yes, I have been using AI generated content to create a wide range of articles across a several industries. So what have my organic results been like?

Before we get onto that, I want to look at a few other things.

The rise of low quality content

Low quality content is widespread. In fact, there is a booming market in low quality content which probably contributes billions to the global economy.

I’m talking specifically about the world of link building, guest posts and thin or re-copied content that is literally everywhere. As someone who runs a portfolio of general content magazines and blogs, I see these ‘guest posts’ every day.

By and large the majority of these posts are created specifically to provide a backlink to a business website and serve little value beyond that. They usually just need to hit a specific word count, maybe have a keyword focus and hey presto, here’s your shit content.

I wrote about the broader problems of the link building industry before, which contributes to other issues such as ad fraud. But the other problem is that we just have a huge market for utterly hollow, badly written and generally low quality content.

Some of the sites that host this type of content are actually huge too. I’m looking at sites like ScoopEarth dot com, or TimeBusinessNews dot com. Both of these are examples of the massive rise of low quality content platforms - which begs the question - if these sites can rank content with garbage content, why shouldn’t AI be any different?

Creating quality content with AI

This brings me to using AI to create content. On a daily basis I create probably 5 different types of content, from scratch.

• High quality blog content for my clients
• High quality blog content for my own websites
• Social media content for clients and my own sites
• Low grade content for guest posts and backlinks
• Video scripts and other broader application content

I use a suite of premium tools to do this. While I do love Chat GPT, I also use Copy.ai to create the bulk of my content. There are several reasons for this, which are basically that Copy AI allows you to summarise live content from the internet, add your own prompt templates and store things like brand voice.

Take a read of my full Copy AI review.

But generating my AI content isn’t the end of it. I then run it through Surfer SEO to ensure we’re hitting those SEO tick boxes, and usually add a human element to it as well.

So how am I doing? What are the results of this human edited and optimized AI generated content?

Actually, a lot of it is ranking. That might be because I’m an SEO pro, so I identify my search terms and structure the content in such a way that it is more than just machine generated fluff.

One of my clients has even seen a consistent growth in traffic and search rankings as a result of my AI generated content campaign.

Building a site with AI generated content

But wait… I have also been creating AI content for a news magazine site I run, with very little additional editing. And guess how thats been going?

Yup. This site has pretty much basic AI generated content that has been mostly untouched. I started it about a year ago (ish) and with only minimal time, it’s gone from zero to pretty much 1000 monthly views.

That might not be a prolific amount of traffic, but it’s pretty solid for a site which only receives around 4 or 5 AI generated blogs per month.

The trick has been, again, to focus on specific search terms and then create a good prompt for my AI tool. And because I’m an SEO pro I know about things like good headers, alt-tags and getting the all-important backlinks (from those sh*tty sites like ScoopEarth).

What’s the lesson here?

AI content does rank, and AI content is most definitely NOT bad for SEO. But the caveat is: You have to do it properly.

Crappy content vs AI content: Is it the same thing?

Perhaps you’re asking, ‘but doesn’t this rise in AI generated content just mean more spun content?’ In short, does more AI content mean more crud in the swamp of low quality search results?

One result of all this AI generated content for the search results is that there is going to be more of it on page one of Google. From a user perspective does this mean that content is of lower quality than before the rise of AI tools?

Actually, I’m going to say that AI content is currently producing better original content than some of the writers I’ve worked with in the past.

Example:

I hired a writer a year or so back to put together some lifestyle related guides for a new site. His content was pretty much the same thing you’d have found on any other site. Basically re-hashed content.

A year later, I used Copy AI to come up with a bunch of content ideas based on a similar theme. Some good suggestions resulted in me using Copy AI to write the articles.

And now?

Those articles are actually some of my best ranking content and contain a mixture of useful original information, actionable elements and are even less full of typos and weird formatting errors than my content writer written blogs.

In fact I think that AI content writers, run by people who know what they’re doing, are reducing the amount of crap out there.

In Summary: Is AI content bad for SEO?

While AI content might be used to generate a huge amount of generic content, which could potentially dilute the SERPs more than usual, the actual performance of SEO is, from my experience, excellent.

AI content is less prone to being generic and rubbish than a cheap content writer. And with a bit of professional expertise, SEO content can actually perform really well for your site. Even relatively un-edited content can perform well if it’s crafted with the right audience in mind.