Content creation is hard, time-consuming, and often costly. We absolutely understand the allure that AI writing tools have for SMBs. But if you’re looking to boost your site’s organic search visibility or your citations in AI results, using AI to write articles won’t improve your chances. In fact, AI content will damage your rankings and your visibility to your target audience.
The AI Copywriting Trap
Generative AI can feel like a game changer for businesses with limited resources for content creation and general creative work. An AI content generator can scale your output as much as you want.
You’re not wrong. It is a game changer. The problem is that it doesn’t always change the game for the better. In the eyes of your human audience as well as the almighty social media and search algorithms controlling your visibility to your human audience, generative AI often changes the game for the worse.
The problem with AI content is that an AI content generator can produce endless quantity, but not proportional quality. Since algorithms and audiences seek out markers of quality, a deluge of quantity won’t push you to the top. In fact, attempting to scale your website’s content with generative AI is more likely to sink you to the bottom, especially in organic search.
The Scaled Content Abuse section of Google’s spam policy specifically calls out “Using generative AI tools or other similar tools to generate many pages without adding value for users.” Low-value content degrades the Google user experience, therefore Google seeks to prevent it from appearing in search results.
“That’s okay,” you may think. “I’ll just make sure my AI content is unique and high quality.” But that is far easier said than done, and failing to do it can result in heavy search visibility losses. When it’s all said and done, the labor you’ll put into revising AI content to the level of value it needs won’t save you much time or money compared to starting out with organically written content in the first place.
Common Problems with AI Generated Content
Problems with AI generated content range from major, objective issues like factual inaccuracies and hallucinated citations, to more subjective but still damaging weaknesses like the generic writing voice and cookie-cutter article structure that many readers can already identify (and have already learned to tune out or actively detest).
The quality of output of different AI writing tools will vary. Paid AI copywriting tools generally produce superficially higher quality content than free AI writing tools. However, all AI content suffers from the same weaknesses because all AI content generator technology operates on the same basic model of ingesting existing content in order to “create” new content.
AI content can never offer a new or unique perspective, because AI doesn’t think. It only rearranges and regurgitates statements that have already been made. Unfortunately for SMBs seeking to rank in traditional and AI search results, this means that AI copywriting is the wrong way to do it.
Does AI Content Hurt SEO?
Organic search remains a powerful tool for SMBs to increase their visibility to their audiences at various stages of their buying journey. Your AI and SEO strategy is critical to your business success. Yes, SEO still matters even though newer SERP features like the Google Gemini AI Overview now take up the top section of search results.
Within digital marketing circles, some have rushed to declare that SEO is dead and GEO (generative engine optimization) is the wave of the future. This makes for an attention-grabbing headline and some very shareable quotes, but it’s simply incorrect.
The more accurate perspective is that GEO is simply an evolution of SEO. In fact, according to Google’s own guidance on optimizing for generative AI search, the best thing to do is to “apply foundational SEO best practices.”
This means creating helpful, trustworthy content with a distinct perspective and unique insights. That distinct perspective and those unique insights are beyond the capabilities of LLMs, which simply use complex mathematical algorithms to place words next to each other in an order that the algorithms have calculated are probably what the person typing the prompt wishes to see.
AI Content vs Human Content: Quantity vs Quality
Scaling your website content with AI blog post writing to target a large number of keywords acts as a signal telling Google that your URLs are spam. The more low-quality URLs Google flags as spam, the more your website’s authority drops. This affects both your visibility in search and AI Overview results.
You begin to lose rankings and visibility. Targeting an enormous number of keywords won’t help your business if your site doesn’t show up for any of them when your target customer performs their search.
On the other hand, creating truly unique, valuable, and insightful human-written content that targets a smaller number of carefully selected keywords will boost both your search rankings and your AI visibility. In the end, the discussion around AI and SEO lands in the same place organic search always has. It’s about strategic targeting.
Know your target audience and the pain points they need to solve. Curate your keywords to target those pain points and answer their questions clearly and in a way that only you or your business can. Remaining human-first even in the GEO era will future-proof your content for years to come.
Are there ways in which AI can be used for good when it comes to marketing? Absolutely! AI can accelerate SEO research including topic ideas, copy edits, and more. But when it comes to creating new content, rely on your human hands.
