Should you get ChatGPT to write content for your website?

What happens if you get the AI content generator ChatGPT to write a blog post? Will it get it right? How much editing and restructuring would it need, and is it a viable option if you want to create content for your website?

Let’s put it to the test.

We asked ChatGPT to write an article about the latest SEO trends. You can see the results below.

ChatGPT prompt:

Write an article about the latest SEO trends

 
ChatGPT’s reply:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is constantly evolving and adapting to new algorithms and technology. Here are some of the latest trends in SEO: 

1. Voice Search Optimization: With the popularity of voice assistants like Siri and Alexa, optimizing content for voice search is becoming increasingly important. Voice searches tend to be longer and more conversational, so using long-tail keywords and natural language can help improve visibility.
2. Artificial Intelligence: AI is playing an increasingly big role in SEO. Google’s AI algorithms, known as RankBrain, are becoming more sophisticated, and AI is also being used to automate and optimize various SEO tasks.
3. Mobile-First Indexing: With the majority of internet traffic now coming from mobile devices, Google has moved to a mobile-first indexing approach. This means that a website’s mobile version is used as the primary source for determining its ranking.
4. Local SEO: Local search optimization is becoming more important as people rely on search engines to find nearby businesses. Optimizing for local search involves claiming and verifying your Google My Business listing, building local citations, and obtaining positive reviews.
5. Core Web Vitals: Core Web Vitals are a set of metrics related to website speed and user experience that are being given greater weight in search rankings. Improving these metrics, such as page load speed, interactivity, and visual stability, can improve your site's visibility in search results.
6. E-A-T: Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness (E-A-T) is a concept that Google uses to evaluate the quality of a website and its content. To improve E-A-T, focus on creating high-quality, informative content and building a strong online reputation through backlinks, social media presence, and positive reviews. 

SEO is an ever-changing landscape, and these are just a few of the latest trends that businesses need to be aware of. Staying up to date with the latest changes and best practices is key to achieving and maintaining high search engine rankings. 

(end of reply)

ChatGPT’s article compared to human generated content

ChatGPT’s article is quite short at 316 words. It is an overview, not an exhaustive article. Compared to other articles online, it feels too short and not informative enough. 
 
Articles such as Ahref’s 14 SEO Tips for Higher Rankings written by Joshua Hardwick is obviously of much higher quality with advice that one can implement rather than simply listing the trends. 

That said, the ChatGPT article is well-written and provides a good starting point for a blog post.  
Interestingly, it came pretty close to a 2021 article published by Ahref (8 SEO Trends That Will Continue) which mentioned both VoiceSearch, E-A-T and Mobile Responsiveness as important SEO trends.

Is ChatGPT a search engine?

Looking at the answer above, it begs the question if you can trust the information provided by ChatGPT. Let’s have ChatGPT answer this question for itself.  
 
Question: Is chatgpt like an advanced search engine 

Answer: ChatGPT is a language model developed by OpenAI, not a search engine. However, it can provide answers and information like a search engine in response to natural language queries. Unlike a search engine, which searches the web for answers, ChatGPT is trained on a large corpus of text data and generates its responses based on the patterns it has learned from that data. This allows it to provide more conversational and context-aware answers compared to a traditional search engine.

Can ChatGPT be trusted to provide the correct information?

 AI and Data Policy lawyer Aleksandr Tiulkanov (@shadbush on Twitter) advises you to only use ChatGPT for your work if accurate content is not required or you are willing, as well as qualified, to fact check it yourself. 

According to open.ai’s website, ChatGPT is a language AI meaning that, like a human, it could get its information wrong.

This is one of the major limitations of the platform: 
“ChatGPT sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers. Fixing this issue is challenging, as: (1) during RL training, there’s currently no source of truth; (2) training the model to be more cautious causes it to decline questions that it can answer correctly; and (3) supervised training misleads the model because the ideal answer depends on what the model knows, rather than what the human demonstrator knows.”

AI generated content could have a negative impact on SEO

Some people speculate that AI generated content could hurt your website’s SEO. Google is known for penalising auto-generated content as it is considered low quality content. Some people also hypothesise that Google might become even stricter AI content in the future, as ChatGPT is a competitor of Google’s. 

Should you use ChatGPT to create content for your business?

The short answer is maybe. You can use it, but not exclusively. You can use it as a starting point, but a human fact checker and editor will be needed. You also don’t want to rely too heavily on AI content as it could hurt your website’s SEO.

That said, businesses could use this tool in the brainstorming phase of content generation, or to turn bullet points into coherent paragraphs for select pieces of content. 

The article on SEO that we generated for this experiment could for example serve as the skeleton for a 2023 SEO Trends blog post.

Would you use ChatGPT to write content for your website?