Is AI-assisted content good or bad for website SEO?

Today, many people are turning to AI for content creation. Whether it’s to create text content or even creative assets like images, there are now AI solutions for that. 

This has left both marketers and content creators wondering about the potential of the tech. A big question is the effect AI content can have on SEO. Is AI-assisted content good for it? Or can it actually harm your efforts instead of helping?

What is AI-assisted content?

AI-assisted content is content created with the help of AI tools for content writing. Examples of such tools are ChatGPT and Google’s own Gemini, formerly known as Bard. 

There’s been some disagreement over how to narrow down the term. Some people believe material should only be called AI-assisted if most of it wasn’t created directly by an AI utility. 

If most of the output was created by AI, they say it should be called AI-generated content instead. That’s as opposed to AI-assisted content, where AI “only helped”, as it were.

That being said, it can be hard to define how much work AI should put into content to determine the difference. So, we’ll just use the blanket term “AI-assisted content” to refer to anything created by or with AI tools.

These tools generally all work in the same way. You provide a prompt, e.g. “What is SEO”, and the AI will generate a reply that answers the prompt. This means it can help you craft, analyse, and refine material based on the data it can access.

The pros and cons of using AI content for SEO

Using AI for SEO content creation has both good and bad sides to it.

Pro: Time savings & efficiency

AI uses software and a large database to produce output very swiftly. It can even create a full article in just seconds, which no human can manage. 

This makes it very good for saving time if you’re in a lean marketing team or need to push out assets quickly.

Pro: Cost savings

AI allows you to save on resources when creating content. Many AI platforms are free or cost very little. You can create content for a pittance or barely anything with them – which certainly costs less than hiring a human to do it!

Pro: Consistent output

Given well-crafted, consistent prompts, AI tools can help you produce content that fits specific templates. After all, machines can reproduce patterns effectively. 

This is why prompting skills are key for people working with AI. Once you’ve found the ideal prompt that gives you the content you want, you can use that as a model for your next piece.

Pro: Scalability

Because AI tools can produce work so quickly, you can scale content production much more quickly with them than with a human team.

With a human team, you have far more factors or potential roadblocks. There’s planning, restructuring, training, and acclimation to consider.

---

Con: Lack of originality

A pitfall to using AI is that it lacks originality by design. AI tools use existing datasets to generate new content, even when they’re asked to ideate new material. 

Tools like ChatGPT generally write content by calculating which words are most likely to follow another based on the data they’ve already sampled, for instance. It’s always based on existing data. 

This means AI content will always be similar to existing content. Pure AI content can be repetitive, generic, and in some cases, may even trigger plagiarism or duplication flags.

Con: Factual inaccuracies

AI has no ability to determine if the source it’s pulling from is accurate or not. Indeed, it may be more prone to repeat popular misconceptions simply because they’re common in public datasets. 

This can be a problem, especially if your topic is nuanced or particularly sensitive. Medical content (highly regulated in Singapore!) can be dangerous if left to AI, for instance.

Con: Hallucinations

AI has historically shown a strange tendency to “hallucinate” information. It tends to do this instead of returning an admission of its inability to find the answer to a question. 

This means that it generates a false answer that it then “confirms” by producing invented sources. Again, this can be problematic for content accuracy and usefulness.

Con: Contextual and tone errors

A common problem with AI-powered content creation is due to AI’s inability to understand context and nuance as we do. Tone of voice is difficult to grasp for the tools even now, which can make authentic and emotional content hard to generate with it. 

This can also present problems for marketers who need a distinct “brand voice”. Machines may not perceive that voice the way humans do, so they can’t replicate it properly.

Con: Search engine penalties

AI material that’s been generated without human editing and fact-checking can often read as “generic spam” to a human. Given that Google’s algorithm aims to serve up content human users find useful, that can be a problem. 

Add this to other considerations like Google’s tendency to favour unique content. AI relies on repeating or distilling existing data in established word patterns, so uniqueness isn’t its forte. 

There’s also Google’s enhanced focus on UGC (user-generated content) to consider today, as we see forums like Reddit and Quora climbing the search engine results. All of this can lead to SEO problems when using purely AI material.

Is AI-assisted content good or bad for SEO?

There’s no easy answer for this because the answer is the same as for human-written content. Ultimately, it depends on the quality and usefulness of the content.

AI provides useful support for a lot of the data-sifting or rote tasks of content creation:

• Keyword optimisation 

• Content structure planning

• Topic identification and integration

• Topic research and summarisation

When used appropriately, it can do a lot to support your content creation. That’s because the tasks it performs best are ones that you can automate without harming quality.

The real problems come when you over-rely on the AI to produce without human oversight. Poor or outright incorrect AI content can lead to ranking drops in search engines. Among other things, humans may engage less with it and your bounce rate may rise.

Combination of low-quality AI content with other quantity-focused methods may worsen outcomes too. There have been cases of websites suddenly being de-indexed following rapid mass publication of unedited AI content in an effort to scale.  

A few examples have even received manual actions after being identified as spam by Google classifiers. This can be extremely hard to recover from!

And even without considering SEO, there’s the possibility of overly generic AI content harming your brand perception over time. It may lack the creativity and human touch your customers seek.

Best practices when using AI tools for content

If you want to make the most of AI without too many risks to your marketing, try these tips:

• Have a human edit and fact-check it. People can ensure accuracy, originality, and alignment with your brand voice.

• Use the AI for efficiency but the human for creativity. For instance, the AI can help you find trending topics, but the human can do the actual storytelling.

• Focus on value. If the content just repeats what’s already online without adding anything of value, whether it’s accessibility or a new datapoint, it’s worth little.

Let us help you with your website SEO

Ultimately, AI has things to offer content creators and marketers, but with caveats. You need a balanced approach where you never let the AI do the thinking and all of the work - it still ultimately just a tool to be used to express your human creativity and ideas.

If you need help using it for your SEO or any other part of your digital marketing (SEM, PPC, etc!), talk to us. We specialise in guiding SMEs in Singapore through SEO and digital marketing quandaries. We’ll be glad to schedule a chat about what you need.