The SEO impact of AI-generated content
The new revolution of artificial intelligence is shaking up search engine SEO. So mistake to avoid or good idea to create your web content? WS tells you more about it!
Artificial Intelligence & Search Engines
In recent years, artificial intelligence has been interfering more and more in our daily lives, shaking up the habits and codes that are well anchored in our daily lives. And the web is not spared by this committed revolution!
Search engines & websites are the first to be affected by the arrival of artificial intelligence on the web.
As the user has access to content and research generated by AI, a time of transition and adaptation of your content creation methods seems to be on the horizon.
The web agency tells you more about it!
What is Artificial Intelligence?
Let’s go over the basics first! What is an artificial intelligence? And above all: faced with the many existing variants (artificial intelligence in textual, graphic, algorithmic model, etc.), how to define it?
According to the CNIL (article in French): “For the European Parliament, artificial intelligence represents any tool used by a machine in order to “reproduce behaviors related to humans, such as reasoning, planning and creativity”.
The scientific community agrees today to define 3 main types of artificial intelligence:
- Artificial intelligence called “narrow” (ANI, for Artificial narrow intelligence): the 1st level of artificial intelligence, specialized in a specific field. The ANI is said to be “narrow” because its knowledge does not go beyond its specific domain (the ANI developed for autonomous cars will not be able to answer a question on gardening, for example)
- Artificial general intelligence (AGI): this is strong artificial intelligence, capable of competing with complex human intelligence. This AI can develop thoughts and reason on a multitude of varied subjects, without being constrained to a predetermined domain.
- Artificial superintelligence (ASI, Artificial superintelligence): still undeveloped to date (and very controversial on the scientific and political scene!), this artificial super-intelligence would be endowed with capacities beyond the human species.
Fortunately, it is the second type of intelligence that we are going to talk about today, AGI, for General Artificial Intelligence! It is she who interests us in our web issues and problems.
With the arrival of AI, search engines are evolving to integrate the use of Artificial Intelligence into their algorithms… but they could eventually be completely modified to replace their algorithms with AI alone (like Google)!
It is therefore time for change, and for anticipation of these major modifications to the natural referencing of your site.
For some search engines, the hour of anticipation is already over: at Bing, ChatGPT is already in place! Since the spring of 2023, OpenAI’s artificial intelligence has profoundly modified the search results of Internet users by suggesting advanced results, calibrated to the elements of their query and search history.
The challenge for your site? Adapt to these major changes to remain visible and maintain (or even boost) the positioning of your pages and content!
Your mission, more than ever: produce relevant quality content for users to stand out in the answers offered by the AI. Over-optimization of keywords will no longer suffice! Today, we have to think about user, user and… user! Understand their needs, research and key questions, to best respond to them in the content of your site.
Objective: to produce content so relevant and of high quality that it will make your site a reference in your field of activity!
Maybe AI can help you with that?
Generating your content by AI: a precious help or an error for your SEO?
Today, more than 1 billion active users use ChatGPT, according to French newspaper Le Point. A figure which, if it continues to increase, still raises the question of the originality and uniqueness of the content produced by ChatGPT.
Because we know: duplicate content (identical content between several different pages / websites) is the enemy of your good SEO!
But then, good or bad idea to generate its content of web pages by Artificial Intelligence?
AI: your ally for efficiency & speed!
To a lesser extent, AI has always been more or less associated with SEO. Its cousin and ancestor, the algorithm, has been at the heart of your browser’s search engines for the last century!
Because as you can imagine, it is not the employees of Google who manually choose the positions of the sites in the search results, but many advanced intelligent algorithms which already gave a glimpse of what Artificial Intelligence was going to bring to the searches of the internet users.
So in the end, if artificial intelligence is more or less linked to the very functioning of search engines, why refrain from using it?
Here are 4 good reasons to use Artificial Intelligence to generate your web content:
▶ AI aggregates resources from around the world, with ease – No more feed and content aggregators! By being directly connected to the vastness of the Web, the AI browses, sorts, classifies and selects for you the most relevant resources to respond to your prompt. If done well, you only need 1 or 2 prompts to access complex and specialized information on many topics. And all this, without a line of code or any software to open to choose the sources and resources to study!
▶ AI therefore has access to complex, varied and almost infinite knowledge – Are you looking for information on a subject? AI can facilitate your search by suggesting the right sources to use. By cross-referencing related content & research, it is even able to answer your most complex questions, those that algorithms sometimes have trouble decoding to offer you the right answer. A precious help for research & understanding of new subjects!
▶ AI makes it easy to compare – By aggregating a multitude of content, pages and information, AI also facilitates benchmarking and competitive analysis! Do you want to know the average length of a content? Compare the keywords of your strategy to that of a competitor? With a bit of technique, the right prompt and maybe a few plugins, the AI takes care of it for you!
AI brings together several tools in one: spell checker, crawler, chatbot, (simple) content formatting tool… AI brings together all these different tools, in the same place. And that is still very practical!
But above all, above all:
The #1 advantage of Artificial Intelligence: speed!
The AI does it all for you… fast! We are not going to lie to each other: all the tasks, missions and actions that we have just mentioned can more or less easily be carried out by a human. And with results of excellent quality, very often! But the main advantage of AI remains above all else… its speed of execution.
When not overloaded with requests (and yes, AIs stay connected to the internet and therefore can be unavailable!), ChatGPT takes on average between 15 and 35 seconds to respond to you.
Just imagine the time you would take to:
- Transform a complete paragraph into a bulleted list, according to specific criteria
- Seek the right source of information to find the right answer to your question
- Brainstorm ideas for keywords, names, related products…
… Surely more than 30 seconds, right?
The speed of carrying out a task (productivity gain) is therefore the No. 1 advantage to be retained to justify the use of artificial intelligence.
Content creation – AI will never replace humans!
Content generated by AI: the essential re-working of the human
But as the saying goes… “Fast and good never go together”!
The intelligence and speed of AI have their limit: the quality and veracity of the final content.
Also, if Artificial Intelligence can help you produce your content, human work remains essential today for:
▶ Check the veracity of information generated by AI: AI tends to project itself onto logical hypotheses. But all logic has its limits! For example, try asking ChatGPT to describe cow eggs to you. As a human, you know very well that your question makes no sense. But for the AI, your question necessarily has an origin! It is therefore possible that the AI takes for granted the fact that there are indeed cow eggs, and that it must describe them to you. This is a banal example, but more serious errors can still slip into the responses of artificial intelligences, which are still struggling to verify the veracity of their information. You must therefore absolutely plan a verification phase for the texts generated by artificial intelligence!
▶ Bring nuance and consistency to your content: Our world is complex, with almost infinite variations and possibilities, it is impossible to know the whole truth on any subject. And this is what makes all the richness of our world! But this variable complexity is still difficult to take into account for current AI models. AI-generated texts therefore tend to be quite radical, too certain, and to erase (or even completely remove) the complexity / variability of your subjects. A human re-work will be necessary to bring its share of nuances, small details that will give all their meaning to your content!
▶ Go from complex analysis to tailor-made analysis: each situation being unique, human intervention remains essential to guarantee a truly relevant analysis in your case. Made-to-measure and the ability to adapt are the main assets of humans. Let’s not let AI make us lose these qualities!
▶ Make the experience and reality on the ground speak: Because to know your targets and their needs, nothing beats field surveys! Experience and confrontation with reality are the 2 factors that differentiate complex analysis from real expertise. An empiricism that AIs cannot ultimately fully understand. Because in the end, if the web is inspired by and describes reality, the digital world and the real world remain, and will probably always remain 2 very different worlds, with very existing connections… but different all the same.
▶ Remain the guarantors of the morality and ethics of your content: because certain models of artificial intelligence have already generated more than questionable answers from a moral point of view, proofreading and rewriting will always be necessary to guarantee respect for your fundamental values, in particular in terms of ethics.
Moral of the story: AI will never replace humans!
To guarantee its quality, relevance and authenticity (essential for your good SEO referencing), content generated by artificial intelligence must always be proofread, revised and refined by professionals (web writing, design, or other depending on the AI concerned).
And that’s good, because you are just on the site of a web agency ready to advise you 😉
To be accompanied in your content strategy, natural referencing, or in the creation of your website, contact your favorite web agency.
Because at WS, we choose expertise and human relations!