My advice has always been – Don’t do it! What’s the difference between using ChatGPT to build a page versus copying a couple of pages of top-ranking content, merging it and tweaking it to avoid plagiarism accusations?
- The difference is both speed and dramatic reduction of effort for you.
- But you still cheated, and its still copied content – so 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. You created something from existing old information using a tool to sift, merge and regurgitate what other people wrote about the topic prior to 2021.
There’s a lot of people making a $ selling the AI snake oil. Every claim should be taken a grain of salt, tequila and a slice of lime.
Is it Cheating?
E-E-A-T is a growing in importance as Google sets out to combat AI generated homogenised page content. Yes, you read that right… Google doesn’t want to reward cheaters… they want to reward helpful, insightful and genuinely useful content.
- The inexperienced see 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 content and human-generated helpful content. And they never read the rules!
- The dodgy SEO agencies use AI generated content to generate superficially impressive web page content that’s optimised for rankings. It save time, thus making them more money for less effort.
Sure, you can use ChatGPT and the likes to populate your website with AI generated content that’s optimised for search engines. It will (probably) be free of grammatical errors, and spelling and punctuation will be correct (hopefully). It can be search engine optimised too, based on SEO practices pre-2021. You might even get a short-term boost in rankings from doing that.
But you need to be aware that Google is actively developing algorithms to identify this 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 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 are not even “in” the ChatGPT language model at time of writing this.
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?
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 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 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’s just smarter 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 any number of topics where the production of such content can 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/
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.
Page last updated on Monday, September 4, 2023 by the author Ben Kemp