Can AI tools like ChatGPT really write like a human and avoid detection by Google? Here’s what Peter Nay found after 100 hours of research.
I’ve gone deep down the AI rabbit hole over the past month and found that there are some key ways businesses can benefit from implementing AI like ChatGPT into their SEO development. But, be warned. After some testing, we found that it can’t be used to write your entire strategy. Steer clear of these red flags below.
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While chatbots have been around for quite some time, OpenAI’s ChatGPT hit the internet in November 2022 with a free to use, simple app interface. And after one week it reportedly had over one million users. By January 2023, Google recorded 13.6 million searches.
Source: Google Keyword Planner, US market
The internet was abuzz with everyone from professors to celebrities remarking on their results and how to use it. I’ve spent 100 hours of research and tested out the new trend.
Some people believe they’ve cracked the code with ChatGPT and you can instruct it to write like a human. However, I think they are being a little too optimistic. In fact, they’d be lying if they said their entire website is AI written. This is because for a long time it went against Google’s Search Essential guidelines.
Even though Google has revised its guidelines and AI content can be pulled into search results, it can still detect AI content, which it believes can be spammy, unoriginal and manipulative of search results.
Google might not de-index your whole website if you publish AI-generated content, but it may not index the pages that have AI content.
Putting ChatGPT To The Test
We wanted to test out the theory that ChatGPT can write like a human. So, we briefed it to write an article and included a detailed explanation of the intricacies in how humans write compared to AI content: humans write with more perplexity and burstiness.
Based on this information, we asked the chatbot to write the article as though a human had written it. We then ran the piece through three different AI detector softwares and they detected it was 99 percent written by AI technology.
Here’s an example of one of the AI detectors:
We then edited the blog so that 50 percent of the piece was AI-written content. After running the piece back through three AI detectors, they all resulted in high AI detection.
So while ChatGPT-3 will be detected as AI-written content, there are still key ways in which we’ve found businesses can leverage the tool.
Keyword Research
ChatGPT is a great tool to help with keyword research. For example, when you are creating supporting web pages for a new category, you can ask the bot for a list of related keywords. And it can help you expand on the topic, instead of using an SEO tool to type in a bunch of random terms.
Blog Topics
Once you have a list of primary and secondary keywords, ChatGPT can help with creating a list of blog topics based on this research. It can also be used for blog structuring. For instance, if you want to write a 1000-word article on a specific topic, ask the chatbot to provide a structure for the blog. It will come back with five or six key subtopics. This can fast-track your content writing process.
Metadata
You can’t have AI software write your website for you, but it can typically help you write everything else. Use ChatGPT to write a website’s meta titles, tags, and descriptions for each page. Google doesn’t look for AI-written metadata, so it’s a great way to help summarize what’s on each page.
Best Practice Using ChatGPT
Google is all about relevance, providing the most pertinent information in the shortest period of time. It doesn’t want people to manipulate the algorithm using AI, otherwise anyone could hack the results for their own commercial benefit and ruin the quality of the search engine.
When you break it down to the nuts and bolts, SEO best practice literally comes down to producing really high-quality content that adds value to the user and prioritizing that content as a primary page in your hierarchy of your site’s structure, so it’s visible for Google to crawl and pull into a search result.
And finally, drive other people to refer to that piece of content through backlinking on high quality websites to create authority. Spammy content and dodgy linking will never work in the long-term.
As with all technology, it’s important to understand the potential risks and limitations of using AI including ChatGPT. However, AI can be a valuable asset for customer service, content creation and research if managed in the right way. Use tools to help guide you and assess their use and avoid an overreliance that results in destroying your website.
