Content marketing used to be simple when I was starting out. You wrote amazing, well-thought-out, compelling content, and as long as it provided value to your target audience and your SEO team didn't mess up, organic traffic followed. Unfortunately, that golden age of content marketing is gone now, but it is not dead yet. In today's digital landscape where everyone has access to AI that can spit out content faster than any human, what is the right approach to content marketing?
The answer isn't simple, or at least, not simple enough to cover in a single blog post. So I'll cover something simpler here instead: spamming AI-generated blogs at the speed of light won't help your brand with content marketing. Please stop it.
Is Using AI-Generated Content Bad?
Using automation—including AI—to generate content with the primary purpose of manipulating ranking in search results is a violation of our spam policies.
That might give the impression that Google's stance is anti-AI, but it isn't.
In fact, the same page clarifies that Google doesn't have a problem with AI-generated content; it has a problem with using AI-generated content to manipulate search rankings and with low-quality content in general (whether made by AI or humans).
Getting back to the point of this post - the central claim is that you should not spam AI-generated content on your website's blog thinking it will help you with rankings or discovery. Google Search explicitly does not endorse this, since it doesn't want to rank low-quality content higher than it should. Substance still matters.
But this also doesn't mean AI-generated content will not rank on Google Search. Google is one of the few companies in the world that can build frontier SOTA models and naturally, they see the future as one with AI in it. They do not have a problem with you using AI to help you with your content; it will only penalize your rankings if it thinks you're trying to game the system with your artificial content or if the content is low-quality.
And that brings me to the secondary point of this post. Most of the AI-generated content is usually "low-quality" in terms of the objective criterion normally used to judge content.
As explained, however content is produced, those seeking success in Google Search should be looking to produce original, high-quality, people-first content demonstrating qualities E-E-A-T. Google Search's guidance about AI-generated content
The gold standard for content still requires a human in the loop if your objective is to gain a steady flow of relevant organic traffic. We are sold dreams of systems where everything is automated, but these systems do not scale and do not create the type of content that is usually seen as "high quality".
Content Marketing and SEO is a Hard and Long Process
If it were easy to rank first for any query, Google's digital ad business would not have been so lucrative. Building relevance and authority through high-quality content and attracting organic traffic with SEO isn't easy; it is more art than science.
As a solo developer or a maker building out a product, it might feel easy to just let the AI write your blog for you and generate 100s of posts and just put it up on your site. But that approach is useless because it won't achieve your goal: getting eyes on your content from your ICP.
If you're looking for someone to help figure this out, reach out via the contact page or email das@pixlw.com!