The marketing world has gone mad with talk about AI-generated content. One of the most popular AI tools is Chat GPT, a machine-learning program that generates text based on user input.
While ChatGPT is an excellent AI tool for fast and cost-effective results, using it without expert guidance can negatively affect your SEO.
Read on to learn how Chat GPT can kill your SEO—and how finding the right ‘AI-to-human ratio’ can help you leverage the efficiency-boosting benefits of artificial intelligence without any drawbacks.
How Chat GPT works
Chat GPT is a freely accessible computer program that can understand and generate very convincing, human-like language.
It works by processing a user’s input—just text, for now—predicting the most likely next word in a sequence of text and responding accordingly. Chat GPT Playground 4, the latest version, allows you to interact with the AI tool using natural language.
OpenAI trained the program on mountains of text data from the internet, teaching it how human language works. When a user types a request into Chat GPT, the program uses its training to generate a relevant and sensible response. If the user repeats or adapts the question, Chat GPT adjusts the weights of the program’s neural network layers to change the results.
Businesses can use generative AI tools like Chat GPT to respond to customer inquiries on websites and social media, improving customer engagement. They can also use Chat GPT to quickly generate content.
But Chat GPT can sometimes output serious inaccuracies, and when used to create online content, it can damage your brand’s SEO.
The limitations of Chat GPT
According to OpenAI, the limitations of Chat GPT include:
- Providing answers that sound plausible, but are incorrect or nonsensical.
- Sensitivity to how you phrase your question. For example, sometimes Chat GPT says it doesn’t know the answer to a question, but if you tweak it slightly, it answers correctly.
- Excessive wordiness and overusing certain phrases, like restating that it’s a language model trained by OpenAI.
- Guessing what the user intended rather than asking clarifying questions for ambiguous queries.
- Occasionally responding to harmful instructions or displaying biased behavior.
Chat GPT also doesn’t understand context outside of the text you’ve given it. This can lead to mistakes or responses that don’t address the user’s intent. It also doesn’t understand emotions and social cues, which can result in inappropriate, irrelevant, and insensitive responses.
Finally, Chat GPT struggles with tasks that require specialized knowledge or language. It was trained on a broad range of texts, but it may not have the knowledge it needs to provide good responses in certain industries.
Chat GPT and SEO content
Unique, high-quality content is essential for SEO as it helps increase visibility and drive relevant traffic to your website.
Search engines like Google prioritize content that provides value to the user and penalizes websites that use duplicate or low-quality content. To support this, Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines focus on four key factors: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.
Simply put, your content must show that you have superior experience, knowledge, and credibility when it comes to what you’re writing about. It should also be attributed to a first-hand expert on the topic. Google may even verify that the author’s or company’s experience in that field is valid.
Chat GPT itself lists the following ways that using the program to generate content on your website can harm your SEO:
- Unoriginal content: Chat GPT is capable of generating large volumes of text quickly, but this can lead to a higher risk of producing unoriginal content that is similar to existing articles or plagiarized from other sources. Search engines penalize websites for duplicate content, which can result in lower rankings and decreased visibility in search results.
- Inconsistent quality: The quality of the content generated by Chat GPT can be inconsistent, as the program’s output is based on patterns and correlations learned from a vast amount of data. This can lead to variations in tone, style, and accuracy, which can negatively impact user experience and a website’s authority score or reputation.
- Limited customization: Chat GPT’s responses may not always be tailored to specific niches or audiences, which can make it difficult to create content that is optimized for search engines and engages with specific target audiences.
Without customization, Chat-GPT-generated content may not address the needs and interests of the intended audience, which can lead to reduced engagement and lower search engine rankings.
- Ethical concerns: Chat GPT’s responses may not always be clearly identified as machine-generated, which can lead to ethical concerns around transparency and authenticity. Users may be misled into believing that the content is created by a human, which can damage trust and credibility.
AI tools like Chat GPT can help you generate content quickly. But the results may not be unique or of a high enough quality to rank well in search results.
Optimizing your AI-to-human ratio
To find the balance between AI and human-led SEO copywriting services, you must understand the strengths and weaknesses of each. AI tools like Chat GPT can generate content quickly and efficiently, but they lack the creativity and nuance of human copywriting.
Here are a few ways you can optimize your AI-to-human ratio.
Idea generation
You may need an SEO copywriter to oversee your content, but they don’t need to generate your ideas too.
Ask Chat GPT to create as many content ideas as you want and use them to compile a shortlist. You can then use this shortlist when briefing your writer.
What to ask Chat GPT:
“List <number> topic ideas related to <keyword>.”
Content research
The best professional writers are excellent researchers. They spend a lot of time learning about a topic so their writing is accurate…but their time can be expensive.
Chat GPT, on the other hand, isn’t always 100% accurate, but using it for research can be a great starting point. Use it to give your writers direction, which could reduce their research time dramatically.
What to ask Chat GPT:
“What are the <number> most important factors to consider for / when <keyword>.”
Short-form content
Chat GPT is really good at generating lists of short, punchy ideas, headlines, and descriptions, which can be helpful for creating:
- Article headlines
- Email subject lines
- Social media posts
- SEO descriptions
What to ask Chat GPT:
“List [number] [type of content] for this [email/article]: [paste in email/article copy].”
Content outlines
Before great copywriters write a piece of content, they usually plot an outline that acts as a guide for writing each section in line with the article’s broader goal and narrative.
An effective content outline can include an intro, specific keywords, related topics, and the goal of that particular piece of content (including the call-to-action).
Surprise, surprise—Chat GPT is great at compiling these content outlines, which can:
- Help you verbalize what you want your content piece to be about
- Simplify and speed up the briefing process with your writer
- Save your writer a lot of time compiling the content outline for you
What to ask Chat GPT:
“Give me a content outline for a/n [content type] on [short summary of overarching topic]. It must include:
[bullets of keywords / topics / headlines / ideas].”
Get future-focused SEO copywriting
Chat GPT isn’t the answer to all your content needs, but it’s still a powerful AI tool that you should take advantage of.
But if you really want to get the most out of it—including building custom content creation automations for more complex deliverables—consider working with prompt engineering experts who can leverage its strengths, so you get the best of both worlds.
Ready to step into the future of AI-supported marketing and content creation? Speak to the copywriting agency that’s leading the way.
