@tjrobertson52

It doesn't matter if AI writes your content. This is a question I get asked all the time. People wanna know if Google's gonna penalize them for using AI to write content, and when I explain no, Google doesn't care if you use AI, they often will say great, I'll just use ChatGPT to create a bunch of blog posts then.

And so I just like to explain why that's a terrible idea.

So Google really doesn't care if your content was written AI? They also don't know if your content was written by AI, but even if they did, they wouldn't care. Google just cares about whether your content is relevant to what people are searching for, and if it satisfies that search intent.

What's the problem with going to ChatGPT and just asking it to write a bunch of SEO optimized blogs for you? Well, the first is, unless you have a very strong understanding of SEO, you're probably targeting the wrong search terms, and that case it doesn't matter how good the copy is, you're wasting your time. The second is ChatGPT really doesn't understand SEO best practices.

ChatGPT just understands the most common SEO advice online, most of which is outdated or was never right to begin with.

I'm not saying you shouldn't be using AI to write your content. You absolutely should. Unless you're some kind of masochist that enjoys writing, this is the best use of AI.

But to do this well, you're gonna have to provide a lot of guidance. I've put thousands of hours into the system that we use, and we're still iterating on it every week. Every piece of content we create has about twelve steps, and there's a human involved in every one of those steps.

Now, with tools like cloud co work, the humans are becoming less involved, but it's still a very involved process. The AI needs to have a complete understanding of your brand, company and your website structure. You need to collect a lot of data, facts and quotes around the topic so that the article has enough facts density to be cited by AI search.

You probably want to develop a brand voice so it sounds like it's coming from a member of your company. Or at the very least, you want to provide some guidelines to prevent it from sounding like generic AI slap.

You just provided actual SEO guidelines that have been curated and kept up to date. If possible, you want an expert from your company to provide some insights and opinions that can be used in the article. At the very least, you need someone to check the article for accuracy.

That part's not so important for Google or AI. They can't tell if something's true or not. But most brands don't want to be posting inaccurate information on their websites.

In the end, AI is not actually helping us create articles much faster. It's helping us create articles that are much higher quality than the human slop we were posting before ChatGPT. On the flip side, if you skip all these steps and just have ChatGPT write articles for your blog, in most cases they aren't gonna rank at all.

You're just filling your website with AI slop for no reason.

That might be the best case scenario. The other possibility is that that you do rank and you start getting traffic. But then Google realizes people are bouncing right off your website and going to your competitors website for higher quality articles.

And then Google devalue your entire website.