Should You Use AI to Generate Content for SEO?

Ashley Scharber - January 12, 2023

The future is here. What once seemed like something only possible in Sci-Fi movies, artificial intelligence has gone mainstream. AI is now commonly used in a wide variety of applications and is part of everyday life.

Almost every week we hear about new advancements in AI capabilities and new applications for its uses. The most recent hot topic has been the release of ChatGPT by OpenAI, a highly advanced large language model chatbot that can engage in dialogue, answer questions and follow directions, like writing content for your website.

All of this advancement and the development of new tools leads to a natural question:

Should We Use AI to Generate Content for SEO?

The short answer (as of today) is that we don’t recommend using AI to write significant amounts of your website’s content for SEO.

Google advises against using “extensive automation to produce content on many topics.” This would include the use of AI tools like ChatGPT. In recent Google algorithm updates (August and December Helpful Content Updates), Google has doubled down on and further detailed the importance of creating high quality content that is valuable for users. Google reps have also stated Google is able to identify and demote AI plagiarized content that has been scraped from other sites.

While the capabilities of AI are impressive, there’s still a lot of room for improvement when it comes to using AI for content creation. In its current form today, AI generated content without considerable human review, editing and expansion may not meet Google’s guidelines for being high quality and “people-first.” If it doesn’t meet those requirements, it will be a challenge to rank well within search and to put you in front of your target audience.

How Can We Use AI for SEO?

Although we don’t recommend using AI alone to write significant amounts of content for you, that doesn’t mean you can’t use AI for SEO. In fact, AI tools can be highly valuable for SEO. They can help you:

• Conduct keyword research
• Generate outlines for your content, including identifying which topics you should cover
• Simplify complex topics
• Identify content optimization opportunities
• Create meta data for your content, including bulk creation for a large number of pages
• Translate content from one language to another
• Conduct research for your writing
• Understand sentiment of text
• Generate headlines
• Summarize longer-form content
• Create social media content, short videos and graphics
• And more…

The possibilities for using AI for SEO are limitless. As these technologies and programs continue to advance, we’re keeping a pulse on the newest developments and possibilities for using AI for SEO. And while we’re not yet at the point where AI should be used for generating significant amounts of content for SEO, there are certainly many ways AI can be incorporated into your writing and SEO processes to help improve your efficiencies and effectiveness. But it’s important to always vet and edit anything produced by AI before pushing it live on your site.