Can AI-Generated Content Hurt Your Search Ranking? [Insights from HubSpot, Litmus, Casted & 500+ Marketers]
AI is giving marketers a newer, faster, and easier way to create content. But will the convenience of AI come at the expense of your search ranking?
After all, if everyone can use AI to create high-quality content at lightning-fast speeds, what will be the great differentiator in search results?
Here, we’ll explore everything you need to know about AI-generated content — including how it performs in search results, its limitations, and tips for leveraging it.
Table of Contents
Can AI-generated content impact my search ranking?
The Limitations of AI-Generated Content
Tips for Using AI-Generated Content
Can AI-generated content hurt my search ranking?
It’s a question on every marketer’s mind: should I use AI to create content?
At this time, Google has made it clear that AI-generated content has no impact on search ranking. As long as your content is helpful, original, and relevant, you have the green light.
In other words, Google is less concerned about how content is produced and more concerned with the quality of the content itself.
Using the E-E-A-T framework, Google will continue to reward content that is:
- Helpful
- Demonstrates expertise
- Published on an authoritative site
- Trustworthy
But here’s the rub: AI-generated content may not check all those boxes.
“Now, more than ever, the value of content hinges on the authenticity of its creator and the underlying value, meaning, story, and perspective of the content they’re creating,” Josh Blyskal, Associate Marketing Technical Manager at HubSpot, told me.
As the internet becomes flooded with AI-written content, the real hurdle is standing out from the masses.
The Limitations of AI-Generated Content
While AI can speed up the content creation process — which certainly has SEO benefits — it’s not a self-driving technology.
For instance, many AI models cannot discern whether the information it collects from the web is correct or not. It may pull information that is inaccurate, unreliable, or even biased. In a similar vein, AI models rely on limited data.
ChatGPT, for example, is limited to data before 2021. If you ask it to write an article about, say, “The Top TikTok Stats of 2023,” it will generate an article with outdated data. Google will then prioritize articles with more current information, potentially impacting your search ranking.
Then there’s the issue of duplicate content. Imagine thousands of marketers asking ChatGPT the same question and pasting its response into their content. When Google crawls these pages, it may determine that the content is unoriginal or lacking expertise.
This isn’t to suggest AI-generated content is inherently bad. In Blyskal’s own words: “If I read an article, liked it, derived value from it, and then discovered that the article was written by AI, would I care? I’m not sure I would.”
However, …read more
Source:: HubSpot Blog
