When it comes to deciding how to use AI for content creation on your website, my advice previously was don’t do it! But that was a couple of years ago, in September 2023. Back then, those early LLMs for early AI systems were limited to data published prior to 2021.
So what’s the difference now between:
- Using ChatGPT or Gemini AI to build a web page on a specific Topic for your website.
- Versus copying a couple of pages of top-ranking content, merging it and tweaking it to avoid plagiarism accusations?
Both options provide a dramatic reduction of effort for you.
In Option 1, if you carefully craft the AI Prompts to generate the outline of the Topic you want to write about, and then fill out the outline with your own knowledge and experience, you are creating a new informational resource. You can preserve and list the citations/references to the research used to substantiate your point of view, and you can voice your experiences and expertise.
In Option 2, you cheated, and it’s still substantially copied content—possibly traceable back to the original source. You are still 2nd best, at best. Don’t fool yourself – you didn’t create something new! It’s definitely NOT unique, authoritative and up-to-date content, written by someone with experience, expertise, authority and trust.
There are a lot of people making a $ selling the AI snake oil. Every claim should be taken with a grain of salt, tequila and a slice of lime.
Contents
Is using AI Cheating?
Not necessarily… E-E-A-T and Helpful Content continue to grow in importance as Google combats low-quality content – be that AI-generated or homogenised duplicate page content. Yes, you read that right… Google doesn’t want to reward cheaters… but they do want to reward helpful, insightful and genuinely useful content.
- The inexperienced saw AI SEO tools as a godsend. They read the BS and not the authoritative information. They don’t perceive the subtle differences between search-engine optimised AI generated content and human-generated helpful content. And they never read the rules!
- Some 3rd-world SEO agencies may use AI-generated content to generate superficially impressive web page content that’s optimised for rankings. It saves time, thus making them more money for less effort.
Sure, you can use ChatGPT or Gemini AI and the likes to populate your website with AI-generated content that’s optimised for search engines. You can use a hosting company’s Website Generator that will ask you some questions and then build you a turnkey website from scratch. It will (probably) be free of grammatical errors, and spelling and punctuation will (hopefully) be correct. It can be search-engine-optimised to some degree too. Hell, you might even get a short-term gain or boost in rankings from doing that.
But you need to be aware that Google is actively developing algorithms to identify this AI-automated content in two ways:
- E-E-A-T – determining the experience, expertise, authority and trust of the website and its content authors.
- Helpful Content – identifying authentic original information written by a human.
Neither the lazy website owner nor the dodgy SEO agency quite grasps the fact that they are now producing what Google doesn’t really want to see.
Quality Rater’s Guidelines
Google has a team of people who work on assessing content in search results to further refine the quality of sites that are listed in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
“This group of more than 10,000 people all over the world work from a common set of search quality rater guidelines used to evaluate the quality of search results — which are publicly available. “
Helpful Content
Google’s release of the Helpful Content algorithm and subsequent updates target “content that seems to have been primarily created for ranking well in search engines rather than to help or inform people.” The algorithm is applied site-wide.
The Convergence – when AI pages meet the Helpful Content Algorithm
There’s a convergence point ahead of you – where your optimised content meets Google’s Helpful Content algorithm head-on.
Google has Spam Policies, Webmaster Guidelines and Terms of Service. ChatGPT and AI tools apparently don’t comprehend those. Updates to those since 2021 were not even “in” the ChatGPT language model at the time of writing this (Sept 2023).
There are serious issues with the fundamental limitations inherent in ChatGPT – currency, for example..
- The natural language processing tool has been trained on data up to 2021 – meaning anything published after that is not included in the output consideration.
- Not being connected to the internet is a second limitation that considerably limits the ability of ChatGPT to create helpful content.
Last but not least, it is vital to remember that AI-written content will have difficulty creating something new – as the output is based on the data it has been fed, and that data ended in 2021.As a result, a layer of human intelligence is a must to meet Google’s search quality guidelines.
Search Engine Land: Has AI changed SEO for better or worse?
Clarification: since 2023, there’s been an explosion of AI advances in the depth and breadth of content covered, in the technology itself, and the rapid expansion of features and functionality. Generative AI search engine bots roam the web, sourcing new data as it is published, filtering it by quality and adding it to their global “knowledge base” if it is relevant and appropriate.
Even for those with decades of experience in the technical IT and SEO realms, the capabilities of the latest versions of AI tools are nothing short of astounding. Truly incredible!!! I am awestruck by what the Gemini AI “Deep Research” tool can produce.
2023 Example: How AI can break the rules
Google’s Spam Policies specifically address “keyword stuffing” as being a transgression. The thinking man would remain aware of what the rules are… Ignorance of the law is no excuse – everyone knows that!
See: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-policies#keyword-stuffing
Here’s an example of a portion of 2023 ChatGPT content generated for the home page of a website…
The website owner contacted me about page speed optimisation. I looked at the site’s performance profile but immediately spotted the keyword stuffing. I told the gentleman that he had a bigger problem than page load speed. I gave him the link to Google’s definitive statement on the keyword stuffing policy. Even then, the gentleman was inclined to believe that “it must be ok because ChatGPT generated it”… This is the power of online hype vs friendly advice from an SEO consultant.
On Mon, Sep 4, 2023 at 1:32 AM Ben Kemp | The SEO Guy <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi Ernie
“Actually, you’ve got it pretty good – better than most sites. But… The content ON the page is actually a bigger threat to Google rankings! Those lists of place names are a clear and unequivocal breach of Google’s Spam Policies: “
– https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-policies#keyword-stuffing
Hi Ben
“Thanks for the advice. I might not have done keyword stuffing, as its been checked by ChatGPT. But I might be wrong. How much would it be for you to do the services described?”
So that’s one of several reasons why I (have) had a jaundiced view of AI-generated content… And why Google is working to combat it. Not only did you cheat, but your AI content generator enabled you to break the fundamental Spam policies in the process.
AI Content IS Detectable!
The naive user may think that their newly AI-generated page is a masterpiece. It’s not… it may just be a smarter-than-usual version of plagiarism. There are already numerous new AI content detectors available – not least to combat the cheating students who prefer taking shortcuts to their degree vs doing the hard work. AI can generate medical information, financial recommendations and content on any number of topics where the production of such content may actually generate harm to a reader.
AI Content Detectors
- https://originality.ai/
- https://www.zerogpt.com/
- Review of AI Detectors: https://www.scribbr.com/ai-tools/best-ai-detector/
AI Content Detection Survey by Search Engine Journal
If you think about ranking an article in Google written by ChatGPT, consider for a moment: If the tools we looked at were able to recognize them as AI-generated, then for Google, detecting them should be a piece of cake.
On top of that, Google has quality raters who will train their system to recognize AI-written articles even better by manually marking them as they find them.
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/chatgpt-content-detect-ai/476781/
What AI Can’t Do?
The fundamental limitations of AI are as follows:
Have an original thought – it just designed to guess the next word in a sentence based on a database.
Cite Sources – Many times it will grab information without citing sources or ensuring it’s an authority.
Fact Check – There are a lot of situations we’re seeing where ChatGPT will just make information up.
Provide insights past 2021 – The database only included information up through the end of Sept 2021. Although, if you provide it a live link of recent content, it can crawl & analyze that for you.
https://www.v9digital.com/insights/is-ai-content-a-good-idea-for-seo/
There’s an article from AIOSEO that puts this in perspective very well.
AIOSEO is one of the oldest SEO plugins for WordPress. You might therefore assign a high score for experience, expertise, authority and trust to intelligently-written articles from them. Here’s what they say – quote:
The hype has led to an explosion of social media threads offering playbooks for making money with AI-generated blog posts and videos.The influencers claim your AI content will rank high in search engine results. So why bother writing it yourself? But if everyone, even your pet parrot, can create push-button content, why would the marketplace value it?
After all, one of the key drivers of value is scarcity. And you know what there’s a scarcity of? Original insights and compelling content forged from personal experience.
Don’t be fooled – the only one making money is the person making you click.
https://aioseo.com/ai-generated-content/
2023 Conclusion
There’s the possibility of some short-term gains. If that’s what you’re all about, good luck to you. If you’re intent on building website content for the future, then you should continue writing thoughtful and helpful articles on topics for which you have both experience and expertise. Doing so will build authority. Google will have a higher opinion of your trustworthiness.
2026 Update
Now the dust has settled, the market has settled out a little, and offerings have stabilised after years of generative AI platform iterations. Has the “big picture” changed in terms of using AI tools to build content?
The answer is a definite “YES!”
There are still “rules” to follow, and if you are using AI to build new pages, you would do well to understand them and follow along.
This is an update to what I suggested previously, revised with my personal experience of using Gemini AI as an aid to writing new content by speeding up the structure creation and listing the elements that ought to be covered.
- Carefully craft the AI Prompts to generate an outline of the Topic you want to write about, with section headings in hierarchical order.
- Then ask AI to evaluate new knowledge and recent research to further expand on the subject.
- Ask AI to do some keyword research, determine the ideal “word embeddings,” and assess what questions are commonly asked about the topic so you can cover those too.
- Fill in the Topic outlines with your own knowledge and experience, including comments on case studies and personal observations. Link to your own About Us page to reference your qualifications and/or work experience.
- List authoritative external topic references and link to them, particularly government regulations, manufacturer guidelines and product instructions as/if applicable.
When you create content this way, you are indeed creating a new informational resource.
If you use AI to generate illustrative images for your content, follow the guidelines for those too – for example:
- Leave the Gemini AI watermark in the bottom right corner in place, or add your own.
- Leave the Gemini AI references in place in the Title and Description.
- Maybe remove the “Gemini” text from the Image Alt text, as that section should really describe the image content, intent and purpose.
- If you make widespread use of AI images throughout the website, consider adding a disclaimer in the footer, adding that for clarity.
All of this should work to your advantage by demonstrating openness and integrity.
Page last updated on Thursday, January 22, 2026 by the author Ben Kemp
