Is It OK To Use AI Generated Content for SEO?

We have been asked many times over the last few months about whether using AI tools such as Chat GPT, Gemini, Copilot etc. to generate content for your website is a good SEO strategy. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of creating and structuring web pages in a way that will help them rank higher in the Google search results for the various search queries that are important to your business. There exists the mistaken impression that you can quickly and easily increase your search rankings with little effort by just using AI generated content.

Trying to manipulate the search results programmatically is as old as Google itself, and it has always been against Google’s terms of service to create auto generated website content specifically for the purpose of manipulating search rankings.

The reality is that AI can be a tremendous help but creating effective, high-quality content consistent with your brand messaging still requires a lot of work.

It is an understatement to say that advancements in these AI tools has been extraordinary. Businesses that are not actively looking for ways to leverage AI will soon find themselves at a competitive disadvantage. Our perspective is that businesses can and should use AI for generating content, but with the understanding that you will still need to ensure the following:

1. You will still need to clearly determine what you want the content to be about in order to properly craft the "prompts" that the AI will use to generate your content.
2. AI tools often “hallucinate” (they give you incorrect information). Accordingly, you will still need to have a subject area expert with writing skills review the content for accuracy and readability.
3. You are still responsible for ensuring that the content does not violate anyone’s copyright or other intellectual property protection.
4. Many businesses have a unique perspective on how they present their product or service offering. If you want your brands unique personality to shine through, then you will need to incorporate that into any AI content (either manually or by training AI on examples of your writing).

From the list above you can see that even with AI the amount of work needed to produce quality content is still significant. Using AI does not obviate the need for that work, but it can significantly reduce the time needed to create high quality content for both SEO and non-SEO purposes.

Ultimately, we do not feel that AI will put SEO content writers out of work. However, content writers that use AI will probably put those who do not use AI out of work. It is because of the potential to greatly increase the efficiency of your content creation that we feel incorporating AI into your content creation workflow is essential.