You may have noticed that when you search for something on Google, you get a response from generative AI at the top of the search engine results page (SERP). This is Google Search Generative Experience, or Google SGE, and it’s been gradually changing the landscape of the SERP and thus, of SEO, as it is rolled out across more and more search queries. But what, exactly, does this mean for SEO?
How Does Google Search Generative Experience Affect the Search Engine Results Page?
The primary effect is that the number 1 search result, a highly prized ranking, is much further down on the SERP. The top of the screen is taken up by sponsored ads, generative AI, and YouTube videos. Users have to scroll down to see even the first result on many SERPs, let alone those lower ranked. This makes that top spot much less valuable because generative AI may have already answered the user’s question, reducing the likelihood that they will scroll down to see the web pages that have ranked for that query.
In many ways, we can’t compete with generative AI. However, that doesn’t mean that we’re out of the SEO game. Even as SEO is changing to reflect the presence of generative AI, there are strategies we can focus on to help users find our content.
1. Improve Your Local SEO
Local SEO is going to be increasingly important as generative AI takes over more of the regular SERPs. If a user searches for a keyword in a specific location (for example, “Detroit coffee shop” or “Mexican restaurant near me”), then Google provides a Google map result with the Google Business Profile entries for local businesses that fit the search criteria. If you have a physical location for your business, then filling out this profile in full can help people to find you.
2. Get Into the YouTube Game
YouTube is a search engine in its own right and many people are turning to videos over written content. This presents an opportunity for ranking within YouTube as well as ranking at the top of the Google SERP, which does, depending on the query, include relevant YouTube videos in the generative AI section of the SERP. This represents an opportunity to appear at the top of the SERP, above the top search result in addition to within YouTube’s own search algorithm, providing two places to rank with one video.
3. Focus on Expertise and Experience
Google has long recommended following the EEAT (formerly EAT) guidelines to produce high-quality content: expertise, experience, authority, and trustworthiness. Generative AI may be useful for many things, but it cannot replicate human experience. Focusing on your expertise and experience within your field can provide insights that no generative AI can offer. This type of content could attract users who are looking for something more than the more generic responses that AI could provide.
4. Keep Humans Involved
Perhaps the most important thing is to remember that, despite the involvement of AI, Google’s aim is predominantly to connect people with the best possible answers. AI cannot understand people the way people do, so people should therefore be involved in every step of your content creation process, even if you use generative AI yourself. This is because AI can make errors or may misunderstand human emotions and experiences. Having everything at a minimum reviewed by a human maintains a personal touch and increases accuracy. On top of that, it provides something that AI can’t, which is what can compete with AI online.
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Generative AI is a versatile tool that has a wide range of applications across the entire Internet marketing industry. Many have used AI tools in content creation and marketing. But can AI be used to help with SEO optimization? The short answer is yes, but with the caveat that any usage of AI ought to be checked by a human expert.
Can You Use AI for Keyword Research?
To streamline the keyword research process, you can ask ChatGPT or another AI program to search for keyword suggestions and trends. In this case, your AI program may not have access to the latest data and might not be providing recommendations based on the latest SEO landscape. Additionally, even if you ask the AI to explain why it recommends each keyword, you won’t necessarily be able to see the data behind the recommendation. This means that you don’t have a good way to judge the search volume for each keyword recommendation. Plus, you know your own industry much better than any AI would.
Tip: Ask for Long-Tail Keyword Suggestions
Don’t replace Ahrefs or Google Keyword Planner with ChatGPT. Instead, ask your generative AI of choice to suggest long-tail keywords based on your top keywords from your actual keyword research. Another way to use AI with keywords is to ask it to make suggestions for how to incorporate certain keywords into a piece of content. Keep in mind that you’ll want to review anything provided by the AI.
AI can be an excellent tool for writers because it can proofread and make suggestions or even provide inspiration for content. We don’t recommend using AI as the writer without a human to review it. This is because AI can provide incorrect information and doesn’t know your audience and your clients like you do. Additionally, generative AI works by predicting what word should come next given the available context. It doesn’t work by understanding what people will want to read.
Tip: Avoid Using AI as Your Writer
Use ChatGPT or other AI to improve writing or to make the writing process faster. Using ChatGPT to write the entire content for you could end up triggering Google’s anti-spam policies. Google doesn’t punish AI-written content just for being AI-written, but it could be flagged as spam. Additionally, readers may be able to tell that it was AI-written and click away. Either could reduce organic traffic to your website. Instead, a human writer can use ChatGPT to write the first draft, provide feedback, or reduce the amount of time spent on research.
When it comes to research, you can use AI to significantly shorten the time spent. You can simply ask ChatGPT a question and it’ll provide everything you need to know about it. However, it’s important to remember that you should still double-check your research yourself. AI can “hallucinate,” which means that it can provide wrong information, believing it to be correct. Additionally, some AI programs may not have access to the most recent data and could therefore be providing outdated research.
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Technology changes quickly, and lately it seems like it’s been changing faster than ever before. While artificial intelligence has been a part of that technological landscape for many years in varying forms, it’s been making headlines lately because of the release of ChatGPT and other generative AI programs. Now, it’s begun to change the landscape of SEO.
How Does AI Play a Role in Google’s SERP Rankings?
Google has used AI in its algorithm for a long time. So how is AI only recently changing the SEO landscape? The answer has to do with the newer generative AI like ChatGPT. Google has started to include responses from its own generative AI platform, Bard, at the top of search engine results pages. This takes up a lot of real estate on the SERP. Users have to scroll down to see any search results at all, even the very first result. This means that the value of that top spot isn’t what it used to be. For those ranked lower on the SERP, there’s a chance users may never scroll down that far.
Who Is Google’s Algorithm Ranking the Highest?
There are many signals that Google’s algorithm pays attention to when it comes to determining search rankings. User interaction is a major one. Google’s search algorithm looks at such signals as clicks, bounce rate, dwell time, and more; websites that not only attract users to click the link but then also remain on the site for longer tend to end up higher in the SERP rankings. In theory, this means that really good content that is the most helpful to users should rank at the top. However, it often ends up being those with the highest ad spend in practice.
How Does Media Spend Impact Google’s SERP Rankings?
Larger companies with bigger budgets for ad and media spend are going to be more visible. Users will therefore recognize these brands more readily, leading them to more frequently click on links belonging to brands they already know and trust. This means that it can be difficult for new or smaller brands to compete; Google shows users what they expect and want to see, which can mean that it shows more popular content and may not leave room for brands that can’t pay to gain that same level of popularity via advertising.
Is Google Favoring Bigger Brands in SEO?
When asked this question, Amanda Shaffer, the founder and CEO of BrainVine, responded:
“The short answer is that it’s complicated, primarily because there’s more than one type of SEO these days. However, within the current landscape and in the more traditional sense of how SEO has functioned during the last decade, the answer is mostly yes.”
Amanda Shaffer, Founder & CEO of BrainVine
How Can Smaller Brands Compete in the Modern SEO Landscape?
Even if smaller or newer brands may find themselves priced out of the typical SEO landscape thanks to larger brands and AI taking up the bulk of the SERP real estate, that doesn’t mean there aren’t still options. Local SEO, in which you focus on building a brand within your local area, can be a good option because bigger companies may be focusing on a larger scale. Another option is YouTube; even with generative AI added to SERPs, YouTube videos are often featured prominently at the top. Growing a YouTube channel could be a way to compete for space at the top of a search engine results page.
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ChatGPT and other predictive text chatbots like it have been in the news a lot lately as people wonder how they may change our lives. Like it or not, AI is likely to play a major role in a wide range of industries and already has. Google, for example, has used AI in its search algorithms for years. But because ChatGPT, Bard, and the others are more public-facing, people are more aware of them and what they can do.
It’s important to find the right balance between using new technologies when they can help so you don’t get left behind and not getting swept away by the hype to the detriment of your SEO strategy. So, what can you do to make sure that your SEO strategy can weather any changes AI may introduce.
1. Don’t Forget the Human Element
The most important thing is to not rely on AI alone. Whether you’re developing an SEO strategy or a content strategy, don’t replace people with AI. There are too many instances of AI just being downright wrong, to start. While AI like ChatGPT can aid your writers, marketers, and social media specialists, it can’t replace them.
Are Companies Replacing Human Workers With AI?
While it’s been rumored that companies are letting staff go in order to replace them with AI, it’s not a good idea for a variety of reasons. That act alone would be bad for your company’s brand. Then, there are the issues with AI. AI-produced content tends to be thinner than what would rank well on Google. Plus, an AI may not understand what would appear offensive or tone-deaf to your audience. Only humans will truly understand other humans.
2. Focus on Experience
If others are starting to use AI more heavily in their content creation process, there are some steps you can take to stand out from the crowd. Focus on personal experience in the subject. This is something that cannot be replicated by AI, is now one of Google’s (E)EAT characteristics, and is something that users online will be searching for.
What Is EAT?
Google has used EAT (Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness) as benchmarks for measuring quality content. Recently, it has added another E: experience. Personal experience with a subject can make a difference when it comes to search rankings, especially with some competition relying on AI instead of human experts.
3. Video Content
Along with sharing personal experiences, video is also something that can’t easily be done with AI and would therefore be resistant to any changes brought about by the new technology. Plus, users love video content. The popularity of YouTube and the video features on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok is an indication of the medium’s prevalence. Even before ChatGPT’s release, video content was a way to connect with your audience.
Why Is Video Content So Popular?
It’s better to show than it is to tell. For this reason, many people prefer video. It’s easier to see products and services when they’re demonstrated in a video. Plus, videos offer a more personal touch that helps viewers feel more connected.
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Artificial intelligence may sound like something out of science fiction, but it’s been an integral part of our lives for many years now. Google’s search algorithm incorporates artificial intelligence to match users’ search queries with the best possible results. Your email program’s spellchecker is also AI. Both of these have been around for a long time.
More recent developments in artificial intelligence have seen the rise of programs that can do everything from chatting with you like a human would to actually producing written content. ChatGPT is one such artificial intelligence program.
Introduction
ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence programs are set to revolutionize a number of industries. A prominent question is whether or not AI can replace a human writer. The short answer is no. This is because not only is passing off AI-written content as your own considered plagiarism, but that content also may not be of the highest quality. How good ChatGPT’s content can be depends on how you phrase your question or request. Additionally, there are limits to how much an AI can understand human needs.
Key Takeaways
Taking AI-written content and presenting it as your own is plagiarism, whether it’s online or in an academic setting.
There are limits to ChatGPT’s knowledge and quality that could result in incorrect, offensive, or even harmful content.
What you get out of ChatGPT depends on what you put in – learning how to phrase a request or a question to get the most out of using the AI platform is a skill unto itself.
ChatGPT can be a powerful tool to help writers and marketers but it can’t replace the humans involved.
What Is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence model that operates in a dialogue format. This means that you can ask ChatGPT questions and provide it with input and get a response. By feeding ChatGPT the right input, you could use it to write a blog post, an essay, a web page, an article, and more.
When Was ChatGPT Released?
ChatGPT was released in November of 2022, when it almost immediately began trending online. ChatGPT has had a lot of people talking about what it can do and how much it might change marketing and writing.
How Does ChatGPT Work?
ChatGPT works by sifting through terabytes worth of written content, which amounts to billions of words of writing, in order to find the answer to a question or a response to input from a user. This means that while ChatGPT may respond like a person, it’s limited in what it can say by the content it can access. It can’t create anything new or original like a human can, it can only produce answers based on existing content. ChatGPT is also limited in its access to content because it’s not connected to the Internet as a whole.
Can ChatGPT Replace a Human Writer?
According to OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT, there are three limitations to ChatGPT:
ChatGPT might occasionally provide incorrect information
ChatGPT might occasionally provide biased content or harmful instructions
ChatGPT might have limited knowledge of events and the world in general after 2021
Keeping these limitations in mind and the fact that ChatGPT is also limited in the input it receives from the content it can access, it’s currently not recommended to use ChatGPT to replace a human writer. ChatGPT and any other AI can “read” billions of words of data, but still not actually understand either the information it’s been given or the people it’s responding to. There are elements of nuance, knowing your audience, and other human experiences that ChatGPT won’t be able to capture in the way a real human would.
How Do You Use ChatGPT?
To use ChatGPT, go to openai.com and either create an account or log in. If you’re creating an account, you’ll be sent an email to verify your account. You’ll also have to input some personal information, such as your name and your phone number (Open AI will send you a verification code). You’ll then be taken to the main screen of ChatGPT.
Once you’re at ChatGPT’s prompt screen, go ahead and enter your first command or query. A few simple examples are below:
Can ChatGPT Be Used to Produce Written Content?
ChatGPT has a variety of uses, from homework help and language translation to shopping and cooking. In the case of writing an essay or writing a blog or article, you could ask ChatGPT questions about your topic and then use its responses. In a blog, for example, headers are often questions. ChatGPT could technically write the blog for you just by answering each of those questions.
It may not be the best idea to use ChatGPT to produce content for you without a human writer to rework the content, however. This is for a variety of reasons, from accuracy to the risk of accidental plagiarism.
BrainVine’s ChatGPT Test
An AI that can answer questions a writer asks is helpful, but that’s not what might let the program replace a human writer. BrainVine conducted a test with ChatGPT to determine whether it could effectively write for you, not just answer a few questions. Additionally, we wanted to determine whether or not ChatGPT could create written content optimized for SEO, which is a major component of written content on the Internet.
Write an Article About Travel
ChatGPT delivered exactly what was asked. We requested an article about travel and that’s what it provided. The article is very general, but so was the request. ChatGPT won’t be able to take a general request like ‘write an article about travel’ and then turn it into something specific. If you want to use ChatGPT to aid in your content strategy, then you’ll need to specifically plan out what you want it to write about. Human writers can come up with their own topics within a certain category, but an AI cannot.
Write an Article About Traveling to London
Even with a more specific question, ChatGPT’s response is still very general. This isn’t any information that I couldn’t find out via Google. There’s none of the detail and creativity, or personal experience, that really makes human-written content shine. If I want to know what London is like, ChatGPT isn’t going to answer that question for me. Even asking ChatGPT directly, ‘What is London like?’ results in a response about the food and museums.
Write a Blog That Will Help My Jet Charter Website with SEO
With a human writer, you can give them the instruction to write a blog that will help your website with SEO. ChatGPT didn’t understand that instruction and instead of writing an SEO-optimized blog that would help a jet charter company improve its SEO strategy, it instead produced an article making suggestions for how a website can improve its SEO. While these tips, which include keyword research and optimizing your website structure, are helpful, they’re not what was requested.
This suggests that ChatGPT may be able to write, but it a) doesn’t always accurately understand what the person inputting a question or request actually wants and b) cannot optimize your content for SEO. Any mention of SEO may result in an article about SEO. Additionally, the fact that it doesn’t have access to data from after 2021 means that any tips it has about SEO are outdated in an industry that moves incredibly quickly.
Write a User-Friendly Article That Will Help My Jet Charter Website with SEO
Asking for a user-friendly article that’s helpful for a jet charter company’s SEO produced an actual article rather than just SEO tips. The quality of ChatGPT’s answer does depend on how well you phrase your request. Using ChatGPT is a skill unto itself and it, therefore, requires some time and practice to properly learn how to use the tool.
Write an SEO-Optimized Article for a Private Jet Charter Website
For this test, we directly asked ChatGPT to optimize the article for SEO. The earlier article in which we asked for a user-friendly article with SEO was better optimized with keywords pertaining to private jet travel in the header and a numbered list. This article would need to be optimized after the fact.
Can ChatGPT Produce Your Written Content?
At first glance, it looks like ChatGPT could be a cheap and fast way to generate written content. You might think that it could replace the need to hire a human writer or keep a writer on staff. However, that’s not quite the case. ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence programs are intended to be tools to aid writing, not to be the writer.
Why Shouldn’t You Use ChatGPT to Produce Your Written Content?
You can definitely use ChatGPT as a resource, but it shouldn’t function as your writer. Sure, it can generate an article if you tell it to, but Open AI only allows ChatGPT access to certain content. This means limitations in the information that it can provide and the risk of inaccuracies and even bias because ChatGPT doesn’t understand what is offensive and what is not.
On top of that, it’s usually pretty obvious when something has been written by an AI. And when your written content is intended to be used as part of an SEO campaign, you should know that AI can recognize what is written by other AI.
How Can You Tell Something Has Been Written by AI?
Artificial intelligence-written content tends to be simpler than human-written content. The vocabulary tends to be more repetitive and the sentence structure is less complex. AI also just isn’t as creative as a human and has no ability to be original. Plus, Google and other search engines are able to detect AI-generated content, which can impact your SEO.
If you look at the above article examples, you may also notice that the depth of research just isn’t there. What’s more, the user experience (UX) isn’t considered in any notable way. There are no subtitles, no bullet lists, no numbers – nothing to help the user skim through the content for what they’re most interested in.
Can You Use ChatGPT for SEO?
AI-generated content from a program like ChatGPT impacts your SEO negatively primarily if you use them as a replacement for a human writer. Google can recognize when content is AI-written and while Google’s latest update revealed that the search engine won’t penalize content written by an AI just because it’s written by an AI, that doesn’t mean that using exclusively AI-written content is actually good for your SEO.
Does Google Penalize AI-Written Content in Search Rankings?
In the past, Google would penalize content written entirely by an AI with lower rankings in its SERPs. However, shortly after the release of ChatGPT, Google issued an announcement that revealed it would no longer lower the rankings for AI-written content just for being written by an AI. However, that doesn’t mean AI-written content won’t rank lower than human-written content due to other factors, such as quality or SEO optimization.
Can ChatGPT Optimize for SEO?
On its own, ChatGPT doesn’t appear to optimize for SEO the way that Google describes as high-quality. AI-written content isn’t likely to fulfill EEAT, for example. Just because Google isn’t penalizing content for being AI-written doesn’t mean that it’s not still going to focus heavily on promoting high-quality content that displays expertise, authority, trustworthiness, and, its newest addition, experience. AI has no experience with anything in the real world. It can only look through content that humans have produced for answers.
Is Using AI Plagiarism?
Using an AI to write your content for you is plagiarism, even though the author of the content isn’t human. Plagiarism is the act of taking someone else’s work and passing it off as your own, even if that someone isn’t actually living. This is why the academic world is cracking down so hard on students’ use of AI in writing essays.
In fact, the makers of ChatGPT have produced software that can detect whether something was written by an AI or not to mitigate the effects of people using ChatGPT. In fact, they’re also taking steps to include a watermark on anything produced by ChatGPT so that it’s easier to spot.
Is Plagiarism Bad for SEO?
The moral and legal implications of plagiarism aside, it’s also bad for SEO. This is because, with an AI, you can’t guarantee that someone else didn’t ask the exact same question and get the same answer. When Google detects that there is duplicate content, it doesn’t know which page to send viewers to, causing both to drop in rankings because they’re essentially splitting the views between them. With a popular topic, the views could be split even further.
Can AI-Written Content Provide a Good User Experience?
UX plays a major role in SEO because it doesn’t matter how well your content is optimized if users don’t like it, don’t find it useful, or otherwise don’t want to stay on your site. Google measures a good user experience with things like dwell time and bounce rate, figuring that if someone spends a lot of time on your site, then they must have found the experience valuable in some way.
While content from ChatGPT is definitely written in comprehensible, natural-sounding English, it isn’t necessarily going to provide an excellent user experience of the type that would help with your SEO.
Can ChatGPT Produce High-Quality Content?
AI-written content has been described as “a confident bullshitter that can write very convincing nonsense” or “an undergraduate confidently answering a question for which it didn’t attend any lectures” by Benedict Evans, a technology analyst. When you read through content produced by an AI, that comparison seems to fit. In our test of ChatGPT, we did notice that the content was rather thin, filled with easily-Googleable answers rather than the creativity and analysis that you would expect from a good human writer.
At the moment, AI-written content just doesn’t compare in terms of quality to that produced by a human writer. If you’re interested in earning the top rankings on Google SERPs, then relying on AI-produced content is not going to get you there, even without Google purposely penalizing AI content.
What AI Tools Can Improve SEO?
There is a Google Chrome extension that works with ChatGPT called AIPRM. When you add this extension to your browser, it adds a lot of different features to ChatGPT that can help you with SEO, from your keyword strategy to examining your competitors’ content for ways to improve upon it (so you can rank better).
While ChatGPT may not have been able to produce high-quality, well-optimized content entirely on its own with no human input, there are a lot of tools that can utilize ChatGPT to aid human writers in better optimizing their work.
Conclusion
ChatGPT is an incredible tool that can help with both writing and SEO. However, it can’t take the place of a real human doing the work. This is both out of concerns of plagiarism and the fact that an AI isn’t capable of understanding the nuances of human communication. AI-written articles may look good on the surface but typically can’t achieve the depth that human-written content can. How well ChatGPT works as a tool for you, however, does depend on how well you phrase your question or request and there may be a learning curve to take full advantage of its capabilities.
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We’ve been hearing a lot lately about the use of artificial intelligence in everything from Google’s search algorithm to predictive text. Now, there are AI writing tools that can help produce content. Help is the operative word, however, as these are writing tools that can aid a writer. They’re not a replacement for a real, human writer.
What Are AI Writing Tools and What Can They Do?
If you use Gmail or Google Docs, you may have already seen some AI writing tools without realizing it. The predictive text features and even the spell checker are all forms of artificial intelligence. There are much more advanced AI writing tools available now, which use real-world data to produce written content.
What Are the Limitations of AI Writing Tools?
We’re not yet to the point where AI resembles C-3PO from Star Wars. AI at this point in human technological development is a tool, rather than a replacement for writers. AI writing tools need input from writers in order to generate any sort of content at all and also need a human writer to review and adapt the content.
Will AI Ever Replace Human Writers?
Consider C-3PO again. He’s an artificial intelligence designed to understand and communicate with humans. He’s a protocol droid whose primary purpose is human/cyborg relations. Yet he spends all nine Star Wars films bumbling around and generally annoying every human he comes across. He’s repeatedly told to shut up or is outright deactivated by fed-up human characters.
No matter how good AI gets at parsing existing content and using that to generate new content of its own, there will always be parts of the human experience that AI won’t be able to understand. There are parts of the human experience that humans misunderstand. It’s therefore difficult to imagine AI writing being anything other than a tool that a human must provide input for and must adapt in order to produce high-quality content.
Is AI-Generated Content High-Quality?
Quality of writing is one of the biggest differences between AI writing and human writing. If you take the content generated by an AI writing tool and then don’t change it at all, you’ll end up with content that uses the keywords you’re trying to rank for in SEO. However, you’ll also end up with content that doesn’t meet Google’s EAT standards. AI-generated writing is excellent if the only thing you want to do is use keywords, but Google hasn’t used only keywords for ranking content in decades.
Does Google Devalue AI-Generated Content?
In general, yes, Google doesn’t rank AI-generated content as high as it does human-written content. This is because, like C-3PO, AI doesn’t really understand the humans for whom that content is written. An AI writing tool can create sub-headers, insert keywords, and more, but it can’t comprehend what users are looking for when they search.
Google’s latest guidelines say that the best writing is human-written, for humans. If you’re writing with search engines in mind over your human audience, then your content isn’t what Google is looking to promote. AI-written content is for search engines because that’s what AI understands.
How Can You Tell if Writing Is AI-Generated?
AI-generated writing is typically less creative, less trustworthy, less of an authority, and less of an expert. It also doesn’t use a wide range of vocabulary. If you read content that’s just a regurgitation of something else and uses the same words over and over again, that’s a sign that it was written in its entirety by AI without the intervention of a human writer.
Mistakes with the more difficult-to-understand parts of language, like slang, are also signs of an AI. For the same reasons that Google Translate isn’t always reliable for a perfect translation, AI doesn’t always understand nuance in word meaning and grammar.
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