As AI becomes increasingly smarter and more accessible, we’re seeing it begin to automate tasks that people find tedious or time consuming. In the marketing world, we see this take root in the form of generating content. People who don’t have time to write blog posts are using tools like ChatGPT to crank out months of content in only a few minutes. Others are using it to plan out content for social media or scripts for videos. So why isn’t everyone using AI in SEO?
Current Limitations
Let’s start with the obvious: AI like ChatGPT have a limited data set that tends to lack the most up to date data. AI are generally trained on data sets that are from previous years, meaning it will never have the most up to date information on any topic. AI also don’t have a human brain with the capability to judge the quality of a source. This causes uncertainty when it comes to the accuracy of the feedback provided.
The reason that some have been slow to adopt this new technology is because of the uncertainty regarding SEO. Google has said that all AI generated content is against their guidelines. In the past it was clear and easy to spot content written by AI because the sentence structure was robotic and not natural. GPT-3, the newest AI model that ChatGPT is built from, is exceedingly good at mimicking human writing patterns. A question that we’ve heard a lot is “Can Google even detect AI writing?”
While people doubt Google’s current ability to detect AI writing, that doesn’t mean they won’t develop detection methods in the future. The fact that Google sees this as a violation of their guidelines is enough to deter most companies from taking advantage of it.
That said, rankings fluctuate very frequently. Any rankings gained by churning out AI-generated content will likely be lost if Google gains the ability to detect AI writing at any point in the future.
How can we use AI in SEO effectively?
We can use AI to generate blog ideas and topics. For example, asking ChatGPT for a list of blog topics about a certain topic or industry can help speed up your research and keep you organized.
Google Bard
Google recently announced their “Google Bard” system, an AI that gives responses to questions typed into Google. Although Bard isn’t a direct competitor to ChatGPT, it seeks to simplify complicated questions and return easily digestible answers and information while providing sources for further research.
Unfortunately, Bard has some negative connotations for those in the SEO arena.
In Google’s own previews, Bard appears at the top of search results. This means that on some devices, even if you’re ranking in the first position, your results will not be seen.
As we come to grips with AI in SEO, it’s important to stay up to date on changes to search engines and AI. For more information on SEO and related topics, visit our website and jandrmarketing.com.
