By Google’s own admission, AI generated content has been around a long time and has wormed its way onto the internet over the last decade . However, in the last 6 months or so, the spike in AI generated content has been unprecedented, which is largely down to ChatGPT and its rapid emergence. The platform has become so popular that even Google has revised its guidelines on AI-generated content, having previously banned it, to now introducing its own AI model: BART.
John Mueller (Google Senior Search Analyst) had this to say about the use of AI generated content back in April 2022.
“For us these would, essentially, still fall into the category of automatically generated content which is something we’ve had in the Webmaster Guidelines since almost the beginning.
And people have been automatically generating content in lots of different ways. And for us, if you’re using machine learning tools to generate your content, it’s essentially the same as if you’re just shuffling words around, or looking up synonyms, or doing the translation tricks that people used to do. Those kind of things.
My suspicion is maybe the quality of content is a little bit better than the really old school tools, but for us it’s still automatically generated content, and that means for us it’s still against the Webmaster Guidelines. So we would consider that to be spam.” – John Mueller
How can you use them to shape your content creation? Here are the three ways you might choose to utilise it.
1. Do Nothing, completely ignore AI
There will be people who are against it and just wont do anything. They will continue to create content the ‘old fashioned’ way and will almost bury their head in the sand because they don’t like change. In fairness this isn’t the worst option. Its worked up until now and there are no signs that current content creation strategies will just fall off. Doing your own keyword research, writing and optimising blogs with no aid from AI is still (and will be for a very long time) a good way to produce content! It works so why change?
2. Do Everything and spam those AI blogs
Go crazy, generate 10 blogs a day letting the AI write it all. Maybe you think youre a ‘pro’ because you use an extension such as ‘AIPRM for ChatGPT’ and it even writes your meta data, associated keywords are FAQ’s for you.
Well, this isn’t going to help you!
Google are very specific they still want your content to obeyed by their E-E-A-T guidelines meaning everything needs to be factual, authoritative and informative. Unfortunately, as best as it tries, ChatGPT isn’t there – yet.
In fact, this can all be proven with a little side project I am working on which can be found at owenthinks.co.uk. The purpose of this test is to create a website and blogs that is largely generated by AI. The logo is AI generated, large portions of the code behind the website is AI generated but most importantly ALL the content is AI generated. In comparison to other websites with similar targeted keywords it just doesn’t compete. Indexing is harder and trying to out rank other content is nigh on impossible.
3. Something In-between – the sweet-spot.
The sweet-spot! Having pooped on AI generated content in point 2 I am now going to sing its praises and tell you how you should be using it in your content strategy.
The first point is to use it to research a topic, you can ask it to supply you with ideas or investigate a certain piece of information, it can open up new rabbit holes for you to look into and learn about to fully equip you with necessary information to write a blog.
Once equipped you can begin to write the article how you would ‘traditionally’ do so. When you come across a paragraph you want worded differently or are unsure where to start you could ask ChatGPT to give you a helping hand. You might even want to ask it to rewrite certain paragraphs so they are more appropriate for your target audience.
By writing content this way you are making sure everything is factually correct while still utilising AI to help and speed up the process.
Nobody knows exactly if a blog will get ranked on Google, and of course in some instances AI generated content will out perform a blog thats taken hours to write, and it will be annoying. However, its without a doubt important to make sure you don’t become solely reliant on AI content to support your business. Google have repeatedly mentioned the importance of their E-E-A-T guidelines and will, in my opinion, punish your website if its deemed you are spamming content or putting out false information .
If you would like to know more feel free to get in touch and I would love to hold a conversation about how you could utilise AI in your content strategy.
