Danny is the founder and owner of Dsquared Media, a website design and marketing company located in West Palm Beach, FL.
The whole world is beginning to notice the impact of AI. Whether you’ve noticed AI tools at your local grocery store via self-checkout counters, AI-generated images across your social media feed or easy-to-use spell-check applications that make sending your work emails a little easier, AI is everywhere.
ChatGPT is a new AI tool that generates written content in moments. And, as so many AI applications have made life easier, it’s no wonder that people who use the internet to generate business sales are considering how AI tools like ChatGPT can improve their online presence. One thing that many businesses may consider using AI for is search engine optimization. But is using AI content generators a good idea for online marketing purposes like SEO?
Using caution when considering a new approach to SEO is always a good idea, especially when search platforms are still working on new approaches, like algorithm updates, to address these changes that AI brings. It’s crucial to keep in mind the negative effects that using AI could bring about to websites that rely on organic search to generate new business. In fact, there is already some evidence that overreliance on AI for SEO could actually hurt SEO rankings, domain authority and website performance.
All in all, it’s important to consider the risks of using AI for SEO before deciding to use it as an online marketing tool.
The Risks
Some of the risks of relying on AI tools for SEO include:
1. Outdated or inaccurate content can put websites at risk for publishing false information.
First and foremost, while AI is smart, it still needs to be updated. This means that for some uses, it can only produce content using information that was published since its last update. While ChatGPT may be able to access the internet to retrieve new information in some cases, this is not the case all of the time. OpenAI made updates to ChatGPT and GPT-4 in March of 2023, making some of the information it pulls data from already a couple months old.
Therefore, not all of the information AI tools may come up with is reliable, which is an issue for website owners who want to present updated content. Thus, when companies that depend on their SEO performance use AI as a means of creating content on their websites, they’re relying on technology that may be sending them outdated information.
One of Google’s and other search engines’ main criteria for crawling websites and ranking pages is reliable information. So, there is a chance that relying on AI for content could lead to Google or other search engines deeming your site to be misleading—which could lead to a drop in organic traffic and maybe even page or domain authority.
2. AI doesn’t generate original ideas.
You may have heard that content generated by AI tools like ChatGPT is completely original. But, this isn’t exactly accurate as ChatGPT creates all of its generated content using publications and information that’s already available. While it’s true that the words the tool comes up with may not be seen word-for-word anywhere else on the web, the content that’s produced using this AI tool is actually just reconstructed words pulled from sources that were written by actual humans. This means AI-generated content can essentially be reworded plagiarism.
When Google and other search engines crawl websites, an important factor of the algorithm is how original the text on a website is. Eventually, I think Google and other search engines will develop a method to identify unoriginal content—even if it’s content that’s written by a robot. When this happens, websites that rely on AI for their content could get hit badly by this update, resulting in a loss of keyword rankings, organic sessions and conversions and more.
3. AI could lead to an influx of meaningless copy on the internet.
One of the big concerns for search engines is that AI could lead to an influx of useless copy on the internet. The job of Google’s algorithm is to find content that’s informative, easy to understand and original.
However, if every website owner starts to use content-generating AI, everyone will have the same, unoriginal type of copy—making it harder to compete for keywords. This could also result in search engines awarding original, human-written copy with better SEO rankings as it will be increasingly more valuable.
Advice For Businesses
All in all, AI has come a long way in a short amount of time, and it can be helpful in a number of business scenarios. However, due to the risks of using AI content generators for SEO, I recommend that business owners weigh the risks of relying heavily on AI for their SEO marketing approaches.
This means thinking twice before using AI to write blog articles, website copy, meta descriptions, title tags and guest blogs for backlinking. Rather, for the foreseeable future, it may be in business owners’ best interests to continue to rely on humans for these tasks.
While it can be risky using AI software for generating SEO-related content, there are some things that business leaders can use AI for that don’t negatively affect SEO rankings. It’s always helpful to implement faster methods into marketing approaches.
Rather than generating content, it can be helpful to use AI generators for things like coming up with blog topics, understanding more about the information you want to write about, and even developing ideas for social media posts.
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