Local SEO & AI Content: Is AI Generated Content Good for Local SEO?

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What Is AI Content?

AI content is content or copy that is written by Artificial Intelligence, not manually by a human.

There are many AI tools that can write content for you for a fraction of the price compared to a human, but are you getting what you pay for? Will your attempts to create content with AI pay off? Let’s find out!

Is It Ok to Use AI to Write Local SEO Content?

The answer to that question is yes and no. It is ok to do whatever you’d like. But a better question would be, is creating content with 100% AI effective for Local SEO? If you are asking this question, the answer is usually no.

Google Says Inappropriate Use of AI Generated Content Is Against Guidelines

One of the main purposes of creating website content is to get it to rank on search engines in an effort to get more organic traffic. Right?

If that is your main purpose, then using AI may not be a good idea. In fact, it may work against you and your SEO goals.

At this time, inappropriate use of AI is against Google’s guidelines.

When it comes to automatically generated content, our guidance has been consistent for years. Using automation — including AI — to generate content with the primary purpose of manipulating ranking in search results is a violation of our spam policies.

Appropriate use of AI or automation is not against our guidelines. This means that it is not used to generate content primarily to manipulate search rankings, which is against our spam policies.

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2023/02/google-search-and-ai-content

What Are the Risks of Using AI Content for Local SEO?

So if you decide to use AI to write content, what are the risks? What are the worst case scenarios?

Wasted Time & Money

Generally speaking, content that is generated mostly by AI may not rank well on search engines. That means that all the time and money you are investing could be wasted.

AI Might Plagiarize

Since AI tools are trained on already existing content and data, they can regurgitate this information in your content and it may be considered plagiarism.

Manual Penalties from Google

Mueller says content written by AI falls under the category of auto-generated content, which could lead to a manual penalty.

John Mueller (of Google)

May Lose Users from Inaccurate Content

At this time, AI tool and content generators are factually inaccurate. It’s called “hallucination“.

AI tools can be helpful for cleaning up grammar and brainstorming, but if you are depending on AI to be factually accurate, then you are in for a rude awakening. And if you’re like me, once you realize a site has crappy, inaccurate content, you won’t return.

Can Google Detect AI Generated Content?

We don’t have a clear answer on this, but if AI detection tools can tell content was written by AI, don’t you think search engines like Google can as well?

Currently it’s all against the webmaster guidelines. So from our point of view, if we were to run across something like that, if the webspam team were to see it, they would see it as spam.

John Mueller (of Google)

Should You Use AI Content Generators for Writing?

AI tools are trained off of large datasets of content that were created by humans. However, I’ve found that often the facts that were written by AI are incorrect. There is a high likelihood that the content created with AI is inaccurate.

I highly recommend you read this article if you have time: https://www.sterlingsky.ca/using-chat-gpt-for-local-content/

It goes into detail on how inaccurate local SEO content can be when generated by AI. The time it takes to confirm that the data is accurate, takes longer than simply writing the content by hand.

How Can I Use AI Responsibly in My Content Creation Process?

Very good question! I would recommend using AI to brainstorm ideas, help you overcome writer’s block, create content outlines, write page titles, clean up grammar, etc.

A good rule of thumb is to make sure that AI tools like Originality.ai find no more than 10% of the content to be created by AI.

We’ve seen false positives from content that is ran through Grammarly though. Others have reported this issue with Grammarly as well. So be cautious not to fully rely on AI detectors.

Here’s an example of how that would look with Originality.ai.

ai-content-detection-results

Local SEO Content Experts

At CONTENTAMIGO, we don’t use AI to write our content. It’s hand-crafted by humans. We even check our content with AI detection tools to make sure. If you’re looking for authentic, hand-written content, place an order today!