Since the public launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, the world of search engine optimization (SEO) has exploded with talk of using it and similar artificial intelligence (AI) tools for anything from crunching data to writing blog posts. Here at ROI Revolution, we’ve been monitoring the news and testing some of the more popular tools so we can understand the current state of AI with respect to SEO and how the future of using AI for SEO may unfold.
SEO rules and best practices change often because Google constantly tweaks its algorithms and introduces new technology into search. While Google isn’t the only search engine, it is by far the most popular and impactful one, taking 92.58% of the search engine market share in December 2022. Bing came in a very distant second with 3.03%, and Yahoo! claimed 1.24%.
Bing recently announced it will incorporate ChatGPT into its search engine results pages (SERP), but has not given specific details yet, including a launch date.
Smart SEO professionals will look to Google for guidance on how to use emerging technologies like ChatGPT, and as its guidelines are issued and discussed by Google’s spokespeople on social media, we take note.
We will keep this article updated with the latest developments as they become available, so bookmark this page and check back for new information regularly.
Hollywood shines the spotlight on generative AI concerns
July 2023
Hollywood faces a critical turning point as generative artificial intelligence (AI) threatens to replace human labor, sparking concerns among actors and performers.
Joining forces with the Writer’s Guild of America, SAG-AFTRA demands AI regulations to safeguard writers and their creations from AI manipulation.
The first steps toward any meaningful regulatory changes with AI are just beginning. Seven influential AI companies have taken significant strides towards responsible AI practices. Among these companies are Amazon, Google, and OpenAI.
Voluntarily prioritizing security and transparency, they aim to ensure AI technologies are developed responsibly.
The White House’s support further emphasizes the need for collaboration between industry players, academia, and governments to navigate the future of AI.
Here at ROI Revolution, we remain vigilant about AI’s impact on the digital landscape. We’ll keep you informed about the latest AI regulations and responsible practices adopted by industry leaders.
Our SEO experts are here to create quality helpful content that ensures your brand will continue to thrive even as the Google search landscape transforms. To explore how you can exceed your growth goals with our SEO strategy creation and execution, send a message to our team today.
May 2023
What you risk by having AI write your content
On May 10, Google published a blog post describing how Search is evolving as it integrates generative AI into results pages and continues to reward human experience with higher rankings. The next step is the addition of the Perspectives filter to the search engine results pages (SERPs) in the coming weeks, which will highlight content with unique points of view.
In the post, Google says:
“In addition to making it easier to find authentic perspectives, we’re also improving how we rank results in Search overall, with a greater focus on content with unique expertise and experience. Last year, we launched the helpful content system to show more content made for people, and less content made to attract clicks.”
We understand the temptation to use tools like ChatGPT and Jasper.ai to produce lots of content quickly, but we stand by our initial guidance that it’s a risky strategy because if that content appears to Google to be written for the sole purpose of gaining clicks, it could create the opposite effect.
When Google released its last Helpful Content update, they reminded site owners that if there are many pages with content like that on the site, the entire site could be marked as unhelpful and devalued until dramatic improvements are made.
How does Google know if content is AI generated? At this point, the popular tools all work the same way. They use large language models to train on how humans speak and write. They look at data – content – across the web and learn what words are likely to follow other words in a sentence within the context of the topic. Then, the generative AI tools regurgitate what they’ve learned in conversations with users. There’s nothing new or unique about content written by AI because it’s trained on existing data.
This is why AI-detection tools like Originality.ai can be accurate in assessing whether content was written by AI – and if those newer tools can do it, a company like Google who has been using and developing AI systems for years can likely do it better.
So, what will happen if you decide to use Jasper to write 50 new pages of content for your site? At best, Google may just not show those pages because they can tell the pages are AI-generated content. At worst, Google could determine that your site is suffering from quality issues and mark it as unhelpful, making showing up in the rankings even more difficult for any page on your site.
For your best chance at ranking well in the SERPs, create content written by a person with a unique perspective, experience, and expertise.
SEO content writing is one of ROI Revolution’s specialties. Our experts know how to write quality content that will get your site ranking on the first SERP. To explore how we can help you get there, send a message to our team today.
March 2023
Open letter calls for investigation of OpenAI & ChatGPT
ChatGPT has been accused of violating the Federal Trade Commision’s guidance around unfair and deceptive business practices. The complaint, issued by the Center for AI and Digital Policy (CAIDP), says that ChatGPT is “biased, deceptive, and a risk to privacy and public safety.”
CAIDP also claims that GPT-4 doesn’t meet the FTC’s standards that say AI must be “transparent, explainable, and empirically sound while fostering accountability.”
The open letter, released on March 29, 2023, was signed by Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, researchers at Google’s AI lab DeepMind, and others. It states that “contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive” and even goes so far as to ask, “Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization?”
The complaint calls for the investigation of OpenAI and asks for a six-month pause on training AI systems that are more powerful than GPT-4. GPT-4 is the current model used in ChatGPT, and is reportedly much more powerful than its predecessor, GPT-3.
CAIDP is also asking the FTC to require GPT products to be independently assessed before they’re deployed and for OpenAI to create a public incident reporting system for GPT-4.
ChatGPT became the fastest-growing consumer application in history when it garnered 100 million monthly active users just two months into launching.
OpenAI is backed by Microsoft, which has reportedly invested $10 million in the AI technology in addition to integrating it into the Bing search engine.
This could mean significant changes for how businesses leverage ChatGPT. The SEO experts at ROI Revolution are dedicated to staying on top of the constantly shifting ecommerce landscape and anything that could affect SEO. To explore how we can enhance your brand’s SEO presence with expert-backed strategies, send a message to our team today.
January 2023
What Google says about AI for writing
The background for this article really started in December when Google added an E to E-A-T in the Search Quality Evaluators Guidelines. This announcement made it clear that raters are looking for experience in addition to expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness in webpages that answer user queries. By adding personal experience to the equation, we believe Google is clarifying what it’s looking for in product reviews and possibly preparing for an inundation of web pages written by artificial intelligence tools.
Earlier this year, a discussion on Twitter resulted in Google spokesperson Danny Sullivan reiterating that Google wants to rank content that is written for people, not search engines. When asked about Bankrate’s use of AI for writing content on its website, Sullivan’s response was:
“As said before when asked about AI, content created primarily for search engine rankings, however it is done, is against our guidance. If content is helpful and created for people first, that’s not an issue.”
Taken as a whole, recent statements on the subject from Google’s search liaison team and on its developers’ blog point to using caution when considering whether to employ chatbot writing on your website.
Our SEO Team’s AI Writing Experiments & Results
Over the last two months, our team has experimented with chatbot writing tools, including ChatGPT and Jasper.ai, with mixed results.
Jasper.ai leverages Open AI’s GPT-3 models (DaVinci) through API to produce content using their own prompts and sequences. ChatGPT is currently direct-access to OpenAI’s ChatGPT model.
With any computer system, what you get out of it is determined by what you put into it, and these technologies are still in their early stages of development.
ChatGPT is limited by the recency of the data it uses to produce answers to prompts. Even after a January 2023 update, it only has data as recent as 2021, so using it to write about current events would be useless at best and disastrous at worst because it has been known to fabricate research, facts, and events. In fact, when asked to site its sources after giving writing prompt results, it confidently sited sources that did not exist!
Google wants trustworthiness, and made-up sources do not scream “trust me!”
When testing Jasper, we found its blog writing style at about the level of a high school senior answering an essay test question, and it also tended toward questionable creativity. One test asked it to write a blog post about chopping wood in the voice of popular television show host Mike Rowe, and the results were laughable – unless you happen to be Mike Rowe. Here’s an excerpt from that test:
Are you ready to tackle splitting and seasoning your own firewood? Follow Mike Rowe’s tips on cutting logs using a log splitter as well as seasoning methods and get ready to enjoy all those cozy winter nights around your fireplace!
Needless to say, Mike Rowe did not personally provide tips on splitting firewood. It is possible Jasper misinterpreted its own parameter of “in the voice of” to mean label it as this person’s opinion, or it fabricated the origination of the tips on its own. Either way, the results bring us back to the question of trustworthiness.
Based on these findings – the lower quality of the output and whether it is trustworthy – and Google’s guidelines, our team’s current recommendation is to avoid using these tools for writing page content.
Potentially Good Uses of ChatGPT for SEO
There are some safer ways to use tools like ChatGPT for SEO tasks. For example, you can use them for brainstorming blog topic ideas. Our prompts resulted in ten ideas in just seconds, and you can always ask for more. In our trials, we noticed that the more specific the query (like one that included a name brand), the less helpful the results were, while general prompts had the most potentially useful ideas. You may need to tweak the prompts several times to see results you can use.
Keep in mind that if you ask an AI tool for blog post topics, you’ll still want to check relevant keywords for search volume and make sure the topics will be helpful to your website users. You might also need to change the voice of the topic to match your brand’s.
Another safe use of ChatGPT is creating regular expressions (regex) for mining data in Google Analytics – potentially saving you time working on the more technical aspects of SEO.
ChatGPT is also adept at organizing compiled data into tables. You can ask it to create a list and a brief description about each and then ask it to be a table format. The table above shows the results of asking ChatGPT for a list of literary genres and their descriptions presented in a table format.
Tying It All Together: Using AI & ChatGPT for SEO
Should website owners use AI tools for SEO? As is typically the case in the world of SEO, the answer is “it depends.” The faster technology advances, the more important it is to keep up with the latest guidelines. The ROI Revolution SEO team will continue to stay on top of AI news as it relates to the future of search engine optimization. Check back often!
For more of the latest updates on SEO, check out some of our recent blogs below. And if you’re interested in connecting with our SEO experts to explore the growth opportunities we could uncover for you, send a message to our team today!
- January 2023 SEO News Recap
- Optimizing Your Website With Schema Markup
- Exploring Content’s Role in a Google Algorithm Update
Sources
- NBC News, Actors vs. AI: Strike brings focus to emerging use of advanced tech.
- NBC News, Top AI companies agree to work together toward transparency and safety, White House says.
- Google The Keyword Blog, Learn from others’ experiences with more perspectives on Search.
- Google Search Central Blog, What creators should know about Google’s August 2022 helpful content update.
- CNBC, OpenAI faces complaint to FTC that seeks investigation and suspension of ChatGPT releases.
- CNBC, Elon Musk and other tech leaders call for pause on ‘dangerous race’ to make A.I. as advanced as humans.
- OpenAI, ChatGPT.
- Statcounter, Search Engine Market Share Worldwide.
- Google Search Central Blog, Our latest update to the quality rater guidelines: E-A-T gets an extra E for Experience.
- Search Engine Roundtable, Google Reiterates Guidelines On AI Written Content After Bankrate AI Content Writer Gains Attention.
