A View from Guy Willett, Ready Steady Go SEO
Depending on the source and the specific market anywhere between 65% and 90% of all purchase decisions, whether consumer or B2B, begin with online search. So, for most businesses having a website that ranks highly is a crucial advantage.
Of course, AI has transformed websites and it’s estimated up to 75% of new web pages contain some AI generated content. (Ahrefs)
But should they?
For an expert view, we asked Guy for a practical view on using AI when creating content for your website and other digital assets. This is his piece.
AI is prevalent in nearly every aspect of digital marketing. In fact, perhaps what you’re reading now is AI-generated. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to tell. Relax, I can assure you it isn’t – there would probably be fewer grammatical errors for a start!
You can use, of course, tried and tested AI platforms to generate images and text for just about every requirement. But, should you? Is there a reason why you shouldn’t entrust your digital existence, or more specifically, your website, which for many organisations is a huge part of it, to AI?
The problem arises in three ways.
- It can seem like your AI-generated text is unique, but even when you train it with very specific queries, you can begin to see the same structure and even wording appear over and over again. Words like ‘elevate’ for instance, appear more than they would normally occur. This can result in a very ‘vanilla’ copy unless you spend a considerable amount of time paraphrasing.
- Less obviously, the meta formatting you can’t see can affect both AI text and images. So, when you drop an image into your website or copy and paste text from the AI platform onto your website, you are also sending over more than you might be aware of.
- Finally, if you don’t employ critical evaluation of the content, be it text or images, you might fall foul of both human and search engine penalisation. Uncritical usage of either might mean failing to spot glaring errors that humans or bots might spot. This might include spurious facts, source attribution issues, or generative problems, such as text on images not being actual text. Any of these could leave you vulnerable to not being held in high regard by either search engines or human readers.
Of course, you may say that you’ll take your chances, but since it’s a risk. Most AI tools (including Google Gemini) can spot their own creations, ranging from 90-93%! This means there is little chance of you not being spotted.
Of course, being flagged as having AI content and being penalised for it aren’t the same thing. So what are the risks? The March 2024 Core Update saw some heavy penalisation for unhelpful content, particularly for AI-generated content, from which some sites have never recovered. Moreover, once a page or site has been flagged as having AI content, you can’t predict how that site will be treated by Google in its next algorithm update, or further in the future, for that matter.
This doesn’t mean that there isn’t a place for AI in generating content. Although I didn’t create this article using ChatGPT, I did use it to inform some aspects. Let me explain. ChatGPT and other AI platforms can be useful in determining if you’re fully covering a theme. They can provide additional topics or angles that you might not have considered but could be worthwhile exploring.
There is also a significant irony to consider when examining your content and AI. Though you don’t want your content to appear AI-generated, Chat GPT and other platforms are search tools in their own right. I could write a whole article on this.
However, some general advice is to write using correct heading tags, focus on bullet points where possible and to use short paragraphs.
In conclusion, ChatGPT and its ilk can be a great inspiration for content generation but shouldn’t be used as the endpoint. Simply cutting and pasting will leave you vulnerable and even paraphrasing large portions of text or images may not solve the problem where artefacts are held in metadata. And finally, while you may get away with not being penalised today for AI content, being flagged once could lead to penalisation in future.
For more useful pointers on SEO and other aspects of digital marketing you can read Guy’s blog here>>
