The big topic for SEO right now Chat is GPT and how to use AI to generate content. We’ve been saying “content is king” for a few years now, but now we have to include a caveat: the right type of content is king.
There are hundreds of uses for Chat GPT and OpenAI – title tags, on-page content, meta descriptions, marketing emails, chatbots, etc. Basically, any text can be automated to a certain extent.
Google’s official guidelines
Officially, this is a big no from Google. It’s generally considered spam, but the latest evolutions of AI may be advancing faster than Google can keep up with in terms of flagging within its algorithm.
It was much easier to check in the past when auto-generated content could be seen a mile away. Thin content, bad spelling and grammar, and general nonsensical sentences were all the rage for link building 10+ years ago. However, if Google knows you are using auto-generated content, it may be flagged as spam.
However, what this means is up for interpretation. If you have a few articles that are AI generated, you’ll probably be fine and maybe just rank a few pages lower. If you use it on most of your site, you may run the risk of penalties or de-indexing all together.
Of course, that assumes they can tell what AI is generated or not, and Google itself uses chat bots and other forms of AI, so that’s pretty hypocritical of them too!
How to check for AI content
The data and content of Open AI and Chat GPT are all stored, but with the huge increase in popularity, this may change.
So theoretically the content could match, but that’s assuming the content is shared with search engines – which seems unlikely.
Open AI launched their AI text classifier to help check the likelihood of AI-generated content, but it’s by no means foolproof.
We ran some quick tests on this and found that some of our content is unlikely to be AI-generated, but some blogs that we know are written by humans are flagged as “possibly” AI-generated. So either we have secret robots on our team, or the tool isn’t good enough yet. It would be incredibly harsh of Google to penalize a website that is flagged as fake.
Presumably, Google is actively working on methods to detect AI-generated content, but nothing official has been said regarding this latest increase in usage. So for now we’re fine with using it, but it might be worth keeping track of what it’s being used for, especially if it’s your content on high-ranking pages.
Just FYI, I put the content above into the tool and it’s “highly unlikely”, so I’ve passed the Voight-Kampff test for now!
How to use AI content
As mentioned, we have used these AI tools, much like every other digital marketing agency probably has!
The directions given to it are the key to getting good results, so experimentation is necessary. Determining styles and lengths is good for meta titles and descriptions.
This can be done by using the URL as ‘seed’ information, but it works much better by crawling and extracting existing content for optimization.
Of course, you might not have that and you’ll be using AI to create the content on the page in the first place. If this is the case, make sure you stipulate offers, delivery restrictions and other details so that it doesn’t just return incorrect delivery and offer information.
You will always have to rewrite, edit and double check everything. This will be a great time saver, but unless you very, very specifically on your directions, you probably won’t be able to cut and paste directly.
