Read This Before Using ChatGPT For Your Website!

Why ChatGPT isn’t your knight in shining armour for SEO

You probably don’t need me to tell you that the AI phenomenon, ChatGPT, has set the internet and social media ablaze. This mind-blowing AI writer was released in December 2022 and has gone viral. According to global news agency Reuters, ChatGPT has now reached 100 million users and is growing exponentially. To date, Microsoft has invested $10 billion developing OpenAI (the creators of ChatGPT), with more to come.

As sensational as AI writing tools like ChatGPT are, there’s one big question on every website owner’s lips:

“Is AI generated content bad for your SEO and Google rankings?”

The short answer is 100% YES; ChatGPT is bad for SEO!

In a recent Google Search Central SEO hangout, Google’s Search Advocate, John Mueller, said that content automatically generated by AI is currently considered as spam, and spam doesn’t rank on Google.

So while AI content may seem like a quick and easy solution to pump out some content for your website and increase your Google rankings, it may actually do more harm than good for your SEO. It’s highly likely that Google will penalise your website for using spammy AI content and prioritise those websites that have unique, high-quality content instead.

Why Google doesn’t want your AI generated content

To cut through the sheer volume of unhelpful information on the internet, late last year, Google rolled out an update called the Helpful Content Update to prioritise content that connects people to helpful information and ensure people see more original, useful content written by people, for people, in the search results.

You can see where Google is heading with this and how AI generated content doesn’t fit the bill. AI generated content essentially pulls information from a massive database and puts sentences together by predicting the next word in the pattern or sequence. As there is no ‘original thought’ or ‘helpful content’ in the text (which is what Google’s looking for), it’s more like a very impressive way of re-hashing similar information that’s already out there.

Here are a few reasons why ChatGPT generated content is bad for your SEO and won’t help your Google rankings:

• AI content lacks originality, creativity and emotion – all essential for marketing
• AI generated text can be factually incorrect and contain grammatical errors
• The content may not present unique selling points for your business
• It’s not written with your local audience or specific target market in mind
• It won’t convey your authority as a specialist in your service area
• The style of writing doesn’t align with your brand or website

Can Google detect content written by AI and ChatGPT?

Again, the short answer is yes! Since the launch of ChatGPT, there’s been a frenzy of activity to develop tools that detect AI written content; in fact, the creators of ChatGPT launched their own detection tool just last week to do exactly that. So while the detection tools aren’t perfect yet, it’ll only be a matter of time before they are. Busted!

AI detectors use a range of metrics, including breaking the text into building blocks of words and phrases, sentence perplexity and text ‘burstiness’, to assess the likelihood that the text was created by a bot. Human writing has sentences that vary in complexity. Some are simple, and some are complex – these are beautiful qualities of human writing that computers can’t replicate.

What does all of this mean for your SEO?

While AI content might seem like an easy shortcut to boosting your SEO, the main takeaway is that automatically created content is against Google’s Guidelines and could be demoted as spam, making AI content useless (or even negative) for SEO and website content purposes in the long run.

In simple terms, if you want your SEO content to rank on Google, make sure that your content is unique to your business, engaging and provides helpful information to site visitors.

Here at iSonic, our in-house writing team are 100% human (hehe) and provide completely original, high-quality content that’s designed to drive traffic and leads, increase your visibility on Google and meet Google’s Helpful Content guidelines.

If you’d like to chat with us about our content writing services or SEO packages, give our friendly team of growth specialists a call on 1300 924 356 or fill in the quick form below.