Just a few years ago, most generative AI tools and chatbots were little more than fun novelties. 

After ChatGPT blew up in late 2022, it proved that AI had enormous potential for generating content and aiding countless business processes. 

Fast forward to today, and AI tools have become mainstream for virtually all industries.

Over 80% of companies have already adopted AI in some way, and that number only continues to rise.  

Also, ChatGPT has 400 million active users, which is up from 200,000 just six months ago. 

In the marketing world, tons of businesses have hopped on the AI train and use it to help brainstorm ideas, automate email replies, and generate content from scratch. 

However, there has been some pushback against AI-generated content in recent years. 

Most notably, the March 2024 Core Update cracked down on a lot of AI content since it was overpopulating the search results. 

Also, some notable concerns have arisen since the explosion of generative AI. 

For one, some feel that generative AI has the potential to replace human writers altogether. 

On the other side of the spectrum, others feel that AI-generated content can’t rank well (especially in lieu of Google’s update), so they choose to avoid it outright. 

So, what’s the truth?

In reality, Google doesn’t have anything against AI-generated content, it just doesn’t like low-quality content that doesn’t help users. 

The fear that AI will replace human writers has also proved false, as it’s still necessary to use real writers to add humor, original insights, and first-hand experiences. 

In this article, we’ll teach you how you can use AI to create high-quality content that ranks on Google, so stay tuned!

Google’s Stance on AI Content 

First, let’s dispel the myth that Google automatically detects and devalues AI-generated content. 

Google’s official stance is that it rewards high-quality content that exhibits E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness), no matter how it was made. 

A quick glance at Google Search Central confirms this:

As you can see, their focus is on “the quality of the content, rather than how content is produced.”

Translation?

You can totally use AI to create content, so long as it meets Google’s quality criteria. 

The main reason why so many sites using AI content saw drop-offs in traffic during the March 2024 Core Update was because they were producing low-quality content that provided no value to users. 

In other words, this type of content would have been devalued even if it was written by humans. 

If you’re able to create content that exemplifies Google’s E-E-A-T standards, you’ll get rewarded with higher rankings, even if you made it by doing a handstand on your keyboard. 

Also, Google’s John Mueller, who was against AI-generated content in the past, has finally come around on the matter:

He now sees the value AI brings to the table in terms of generating new ideas for content. We also agree with his statement on not blindly following AI tools, as that can cause you to lose your brand identity. 

As he says, “You know your audience much better than any tool.”

Words to live by. 

What’s considered high-quality AI content?

So, by now it should be clear that you can use AI to create high-quality content that ranks well on Google. 

The only question is how?

After all, the articles generated by generative AI tools like ChatGPT are pretty robotic and only contain surface-level insights. They don’t convey human emotions very well, and they aren’t able to share your real-world experiences. 

However, this is only the case if you publish the first draft an AI tool produces. The trick is to continue to refine the AI’s output until it’s closer to something you’d actually want to read. 

Once that’s done, you should edit the article yourself to add your own spin on things. You don’t have to rewrite the entire article by any means, but you should include some original insights (more on this in a bit). 

To give you a clearer view of what high-quality AI content looks like, let’s breakdown E-E-A-T:

  • Experience. Google wants to know that you actually have experience with the topics you publish content on, which is why experience is the first E in the E-E-A-T acronym. This is because it’s always more valuable to receive advice and information from experienced individuals than someone who’s only read about a topic. Sharing personal experiences in your content will let Google know that you’re the real deal and aren’t faking it. 
  • Expertise. Besides having experience with something, it’s also important to Google that you’re an expert on the topic. Page one Google rankings are intended for the cream of the crop, which is why demonstrating your expertise in your content is so important. Wherever possible, display your author’s expertise by listing their credentials and linking to trusted sources that backup your claims. This will signal to Google that you’re an expert worthy of ranking in the #1 organic position. 
  • Authoritativeness. This quality metric is related to your backlink profile. In particular, the pages that you want to rank well on Google need authoritative backlinks (links on other websites) pointing at them. So, if you use AI to help generate a high-quality piece of content, you’ll need to do some link-building to prove its authority to Google. This means you’ll need to conduct outreach to convince reputable site owners and media outlets to link to your articles, which will only work if you produce high-quality content that they deem worthy of sharing with their audiences. 
  • Trustworthiness. Lastly, trustworthiness is gained by illustrating the other quality metrics (experience, expertise, and authoritativeness) in your content. You’ll need top-tier content that demonstrates your real-world experiences and expertise, and you’ll also need high-quality backlinks for each web page. If you can check all those boxes, you’ll build trust with Google, enabling you to rank even higher for more keywords. 

These are the primary components your content needs to be considered high-quality by Google, regardless if you use AI or not. 

How to Optimize AI-Generated Content for SEO: 4 Tips 

Now, let’s learn how to get the most out of your AI content, both for your performance on search engines and your target audience. 

To do so, you should:

  1. Embody E-E-A-T in your content 
  2. Identify and fill in competitor gaps 
  3. Maintain natural readability 
  4. Include human oversight 

Let’s take a closer look at each tip. 

Tip #1: Embody Google’s E-E-A-T qualities 

First, let’s do a more in-depth dive into using Google’s E-E-A-T in AI-generated content. 

We’ll start with experience, which became part of the E-A-T algorithm in December 2022. 

Why did they add the extra E?

There were lots of reasons, but the main two were:

  1. To stop fake product reviews where the reviewer has no real experience with the product. 
  2. To limit the influx of poor-quality AI content that contains no real experiences. 

In regards to the first reason, Google had a growing problem with fake product reviews that simply regurgitated information from other reviews (or only listed public information). 

Also, some sites (like ones selling online courses) would hire people to leave negative reviews of their competitor’s services or products in an attempt to plug their service as an alternative. 

This is NOT helpful to users, as they aren’t getting an honest review of a product or service. 

Adding experience as a quality metric is a way to mitigate this issue. 

So, if you’re creating a product review, you must demonstrate experience with the product or service. 

To quote Google directly, they recommend that you, “provide evidence such as visuals, audio, or other evidence of your experience with the product to support your expertise and reinforce the authenticity of the review.”

Uploading photos and videos of you interacting with the product is the best way to do this, as it provides clear proof that you’ve had first-hand experience with it. 

Even if you aren’t reviewing products, you still need to demonstrate your experience with the topic at hand, as it lets Google know that you’re providing real insights and aren’t simply reiterating what’s already online (which is what low-quality AI-generated content does). 

For instance, if you’re writing about doing SEO, you could share a personal story of a time when you improved a client’s SEO with your team. This is something an AI could never generate, and it’ll boost the quality of your content significantly. 

Displaying your expertise 

You also need to signal Google that you’re an expert in your field, which is mainly tied to:

  1. Providing your author’s credentials 
  2. Backing up your claims with trusted sources 

First, you should provide detailed author bios for your content that details all their degrees, certifications, and accomplishments. It’s also a good idea to link to their social media profiles. This will convey that the content was authored by an expert in the field. 

Here’s an example of one of our author bios:

Another way to demonstrate expertise is to link to trusted sources to back up your claims and provide helpful resources for your users. 

Try to find authoritative websites to link back to, such as .edu and .gov sites (these are exclusive TLDs that carry lots of clout). 

Lastly, quote industry thought leaders and influencers wherever possible, as this will add more credibility to your claims. 

Improving your content’s authority 

Besides linking out to trusted sources, you’ll also want reputable websites to link to your content. 

Whenever another website provides a link to one of your web pages, it’s called a backlink, and it acts as a vote for your content’s credibility, accuracy, and quality. 

Link-building is the practice of acquiring backlinks, and it involves things like digital PR, link insertions, and link outreach. 

This guide contains lots of valuable link-building techniques, so check it out if you’re new to the practice. 

Tip #2: Identify and fill in competitor gaps

A competitor content gap is an area of a topic that your competitors haven’t explored yet. It could be an angle, a technique, or anything else that other websites have failed to mention about a particular subject.

For example, imagine that you want to write an article about a new phone that has just been released, and no other website has mentioned its amazing satellite features. 

By including a detailed section on the phone’s satellite capabilities, you’re adding something original that users can’t find anywhere else. This will make your content more valuable in the eyes of Google (and to your users). 

The last thing you want to do is simply regurgitate the same basic information that every other article on the topic does. 

Before you start generating content for a topic, search for it on Google and peruse the first 5 results or so. 

Which subheadings do they all tend to cover? 

The chances are that they’re highly similar and don’t really add anything new. While you’re reading, try to think of some areas that haven’t been covered anywhere. 

Also, you can provide unique insights by:

  • Conducting original research and experiments (this can be as simple as including a few screenshots of you using a tool) 
  • Sharing real stories (these are made even stronger with photos and videos) 
  • Interviewing industry experts 

Adding these differentiators will make your content stand out to both search engine algorithms and your target audience. 

Tip #3: Maintain natural readability

Next, your content should flow in a natural way, guiding readers from one sentence to the next in a seamless, conversational manner. 

AI isn’t the best at this currently, which is why the output of a tool like ChatGPT always needs some tightening up. 

In particular, aim for short, concise sentences and small paragraphs.

The good thing about AI is you can always ask it to rephrase sentences and break things up so that you don’t always have to correct it manually. 

Here’s an example using ChatGPT. First, I asked it to explain digital marketing to me:

This isn’t bad, but it wouldn’t work for a brand that uses a more conversational tone. So, I simply asked it to try again:

This is more conversational and a bit easier to read, and it would align with a casual brand voice. Always remember that you can build on your previous prompts with generative AI tools to refine outputs and ensure you get what you want.

Tip #4: Include human editing 

Lastly, it’s crucial to give your AI-generated content a once-over by human editors. 

They should:

  • Fact-check the AI’s claims 
  • Align the content with your brand voice (if it isn’t already) 
  • Add original insights 
  • Read the entire post through to ensure it flows and is valuable to audiences 

Taking this step does not have to take a lot of time, but your editors should be thorough. Even with this process, using AI will still drastically speed up the content creation process, so it’s still worth using generative AI tools (especially if you have a smaller team trying to churn out a ton of content). 

Real-World Case Studies: AI Content That Ranks 

Before we let you go, here’s some cold, hard proof that you can use AI-generated content to rank well on Google. 

Case study #1: Casual.app generates 1M monthly visitors with AI content 

Jake Ward, the founder of Byward, recently used AI content to catapult the Casual.App to 1 million monthly visitors in less than a year. 

How did he do it?

His two main takeaways were scalable keyword patterns and minimum viable content. 

He noticed that lots of keywords follow the same patterns, such as ‘define x term’ or ‘formula for the (blank) equation.’

This is beneficial because you can find thousands of viable keywords at once. For minimum viable content, the idea was to lower their content production standards until a piece of content started gaining momentum. 

This enabled them to drastically speed up the content creation process, as they would only do a final edit and review (to add E-E-A-T elements) once a page started generating 100 visitors or more. For the content that failed to generate any traffic, they didn’t waste time improving the quality. 

Bear in mind that this is a risky strategy that can backfire due to publishing lots of low-value content, as that can definitely draw ire from Google. Still, it’s proof that human edited AI content can rank well on search engines since the pieces that took off received additional rewrites and edits. 

Case study #2: Using AI to build a site with 45k monthly visitors 

Jacky Chou (AKA Indexsy on X) used a similar strategy to Ward’s to generate 45k monthly visitors to one of his websites. 

He used Ahrefs to identify thousands of low-competition keywords in his niche. From there, he used an AI service to create content for them. Just like with Ward’s strategy, he would only rewrite and improve the content once it started to rank. This helped him avoid wasting time and effort on articles that weren’t going to generate any traffic. 

As you can see, SEOs are already using AI-generated content to dominate the search results, and they’re using human editing to improve the quality whenever a piece starts to take off. 

Should You Use AI for SEO Content? The Verdict 

Here’s a recap of what we’ve gone over so far:

  1. Google doesn’t automatically devalue AI content. Instead, it devalues low-quality content that provides no value to readers. 
  2. You must display experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness with the topics that you cover online if you want to rank well. 
  3. Ensure your content contains original insights, flows well, and aligns with your brand’s voice. 

So, should you use AI to generate SEO content?

Our recommendation is to combine the sheer speed of AI with the creativity of human writers. After all, that’s how you achieve the best of both worlds (improving the efficiency of content creation plus generating more traffic). 

If you want to enjoy the benefits of this powerful combination without doing the work yourself, don’t wait to check out AI Content Plus, our service that pairs AI with human writers!