As a content strategy agency specializing in planning and audits, we spend a lot of time fixing ineffective blogs.
In about a year from now (that is, in Spring 2024) we expect to see a lot of inquiries from businesses that are going heavy on AI writing tools now.
We’ve experimented with AI writing tools enough to confidently predict that there will be blood.
In fact, we will even launch a new service that helps fix the AI blogging mess.
Here’s why:
As we wrote recently, AI tools can’t produce good content the way human writers can. That won’t change anytime soon.
At the same time, business owners and decision makers are falling for the AI hype – there are just too many ads and promo campaigns for all kinds of content writing, planning, and other tools.
As a result, a lot of businesses fully switch to AI content for blogging, social media, and even service & product copy creation.
The savings are just crazy appealing – you can subscribe to an unlimited text generator for under $50 a month, while you have to pay $100 and above for a single post of really good content.
All of these businesses will need MAJOR work auditing, fixing, and redoing their websites later on, because:
1) AI content does not convert
If you’ve read anything produced by AI writing tools you will agree it’s just a bunch of fitting words glued together.
If you need your content to convert or entice action, you need to target the pain points of your audience and speak their language.
Bots don’t get that nuanced – because they can’t.
Blogs relying on AI-generated posts will do horribly in terms of conversion.
You can remedy the situation somewhat by plugging your products and services into the text but that may require as much work as writing from scratch would.
2) AI content will be detected.
Tools like AI content detector already pick up text compiled by bots with decent accuracy now. You can be sure Google and Bing will do an even better job detecting AI content.
After all, Google has launched their own AI helper BARD. The more advanced AI writers become, the more advanced AI writing detection will be too.
If you go too heavy on AI-generated blog posts, you risk losing it all to a Google update at some point.
Keep in mind Google has already stated that AI-generated content is breaking their Terms of Service.
What’s more, we are sure that low-quality content in general will be triggering a lot of false positives for being AI-sourced, which makes cheap content an even bigger threat to your business.
Can you afford to risk the future of your website in exchange for short-term savings?
3) AI content just doesn’t get indexed easily
You’d think worries about indexation come from the early days of search and could not possibly be a problem in 2023.
We come across more and more sites that produce so much low-quality content that they can’t get all these posts indexed.
Product descriptions, product-based articles like “top X products for Y”, and any other “thin” content has the most trouble indexing. Made-for-Amazon affiliate websites that add zero value are getting wiped out.
Make no mistake, pumping out more content will not automatically make your website stronger. Chances are, you will just start looking spammy to google and join millions of thin websites that struggle to get indexed.
4) AI content does not move you forward
This one is actually the most important out all dangers of AI-generated blog content.
It’s also the least obvious and the hardest to measure & detect one, but trust me, you will face it if you rely on AI writing.
Thing is, when you use AI writing tools, you are de-facto trying to catch up. AI runs searches and recompiles content that’s already been published. As a result you are always a step behind.
This means you are publishing zero thought leadership content.
No ideas or innovation to make you stand out or establish yourself as an authority.
The article you’re reading right now is an example of thought leadership content.
We couldn’t possibly come up with this topic using third party tools or anything written before. We decided to write about this after seeing people being reckless with AI writing tools, observing websites decline in performance, and using our experience & intuition to make a prediction.
As one of the leading content strategy agencies, we want to predict, educate, point out trends and challenges. It’s a great topic for our target market of small business owners – and we can use this post in customer support replies, on sales calls, repurpose it for our Twitter and LinkedIn.
An AI content planner would never come up with this topic, and no AI writing tool would produce anything coherent or meaningful on it. AI is horrible with judgement, predictions, and interpretations.
You may think thought leadership content is unnecessary for some service, affiliate, and ecommerce websites, – but that is a very misleading idea.
The philosophy of online search is shifting towards value, and your website needs to bring value to your target market. Sure, there is foundational content you need to publish, but at some point you will need to progress beyond that. Thought leadership and innovative content is what makes you stand out and 100% immune to future updates and changes.
AI does not help you create thought leadership content, and in the worst case scenario offers you misleading, meaningless, and embarrassing content.
So what do you do?
Be smart and strategic with AI content planning and writing tools.
Exploit AI for grunt work that involves finding, gathering, scraping.
AI can work for mass production of relatively unimportant content, like generation of image alt tags for thousands of products, tweaking descriptions, merging geographical and other data sets, and so on.
But anything that you want a human to read and act upon must be written by a human. In fact, a human that’s good and what she does.