One of the newer concepts you may have recently seen regarding SEO for your business’s website is AI content. AI, which stands for artificial intelligence, is something that is becoming more prevalent in lots of areas whether it is business related or not.
A prime example of AI is a voice-activated device such as Amazon’s Alexa which will respond to voice commands using AI technology.
If you want an AI example in the business world, there are chatbots that reply to chat messages from humans based on what has been entered. Admittedly, they can be frustrating, but when you consider that you can go through an entire chat conversation as though you were chatting to a human customer service rep, but are chatting with AI intelligence, it does seem remarkable.
As for AI content, let us examine what it is. Quite simply it is content that is written, not by a human, but by technology that has been programmed with vocabulary, grammar principles, and syntax rules, and when given a subject it will create content on that subject. Some of the most advanced AI creators can create content that some struggle to distinguish from content written by a human.
However, most writing produced by AI technology will still need to be checked by a human and in most cases edited so that when read it makes perfect sense. The question which is raised at this point is “Can AI content be used to improve your SEO?”.
AI Content And SEO – The Advantages
The answer you will receive to that question, and whether that answer is a “Yes” or a “No” will vary. Those involved with the development of AI technology and who have AI products that are claimed to be able to write SEO content will point to their many happy clients who have used AI technology to create content for SEO purposes.
Some of the advantages that are claimed for AI SEO content include that it is relevant and fully optimised based on what the AI content writer has been programmed to write. It is also likely to be written quicker than the time many human writers may take.
AI content is also likely to be created using sources of information that are far more diverse than the number of sources that a human writer might be able to access. Finally, the amount of AI SEO content that technology can create is going to be greater than a human writer given that it has no need for breaks or to sleep.
AI Content And SEO – The Disadvantages
No matter how good the technology is, it is true that an AI content writer can never reproduce the writing that a human can. This means many of the nuances, the inflections, the humour, and the emotion that humans can add to their writing can never be 100% replicated by machines.
It is also the case that, given the many ways that writing for SEO must meet guidelines for what Google wants to see in content, AI writers will often be unable to achieve every one of them. However, human writers know what is required for SEO and can do so within a piece of content, such as by using keywords within phrases.
The Huge Elephant In The Room
That elephant is Google. The reason is Google have stated that AI-generated content is contrary to its guidelines which state that automatically generated content is considered spam and thus not acceptable for SEO purposes. Now, the fact is AI content can rank which suggests that some is not detectable and that Google’s systems may lack the ability to determine what is AI content and which has been created by humans.
Even Google themselves say that they do not claim to be able to spot every piece of AI-generated content. However, they do say that if they do, they will downgrade content as well as rankings for any website that has it. So, it is not a question of whether AI content can improve SEO, but whether you wish to risk using it.