The marketplace for search has been host to an ongoing battle between the quality of results and the mass production of dubious value content. Google, Bing, and other lesser-known engines have worked tirelessly to penalize or degrade low-quality content that is primarily designed for ranking instead of genuine value for users as well as simultaneously rewarding content that meets their quality-evaluation algorithm.
In the last couple of years, it has appeared that the engines have prevailed. The earliest machine-generated content rarely made it through spam filters, and cheap, low-quality boilerplate content hasn’t always earned high ranking or even useful traffic. Human-written, high-quality content was the norm for publishers that wanted to benefit from high rankings as well as the traffic they generated.
Recent technological advances threaten that comfortable and settled image. The advent of technology that can create high-quality, believable human-written content is a huge threat to the industry of search—and consequently to writers, content marketers, and everyone else who has an interest in the results game.
How AI-Generated Content Impacts Search Results
The recent hype surrounding ChatGPT, as well as other artificial intelligence (AI) software, has been focused on the ease with which it’s now possible to create reams of top-quality content from the touch of a button. A lot of discussion has been devoted to the implications for marketers and writers Who needs the expense and complexities of human imagination when machines can create beautiful text so quickly?
However, the latest changes at Microsoft’s Bing provide a different view of artificial intelligence-generated content coins. The search engine has added the most recent version of ChatGPT technology to its search results, which has resulted in an improvement in the quality. Searches that involve complicated language and concepts can provide answers that are superficially like what a human researcher can provide if the AI scans its database for relevant data and then repackages it into encapsulated, deep, comprehensive, and completely machine-generated responses.
Furthermore, the version of ChatGPT that powers these latest results is more recent and precise than the previous publicly available version, which makes Bing’s results more current and complete and also extremely accessible.
At the moment, Bing is firmly a second-tier engine, hovering in the lower single digits of market share percent. However, with Microsoft having ignited the fire by generating superior results using AI, Google is now ordered to follow if it wishes to maintain its dominance in the industry. Due to that dominance, the direction Google adopts is crucial for content marketers that want to benefit from the future of rankings and traffic.
Google has begun to integrate AI-generated content in its search results with a custom AI bot dubbed Bard. However, as recent developments have demonstrated, the accuracy of Google’s algorithm could leave a lot to be desired. The first public display of the software returned an easily disproved “fact” regarding the findings of James Webb’s telescope. James Webb telescope, leading to an embarrassing situation for Google and the slamming of shares, which wiped out an estimated $150 billion off the value of its parent company.
There’s no reason to believe that Google will be left in the dust for a long time, considering its history of rapid technological advancement. It seems certain that the search engine’s results will evolve to contain more and more artificial intelligence-generated content, which could sound alarm bells for publishers who’d rather have their own carefully crafted content topping the rankings.
Could Content Marketers and Writers Harness AI-Generated Content
Whatever the outcome, the successful content marketers will have to adjust and take advantage of the opportunities that are bound to appear. A good first step to consider might be combating fire with fire.
If the engines serve up artificial intelligence-generated content, is the door now open for publishers to do the same? Writers could simplify their work lives by using huge quantities of AI text as the foundation for their work.
Up until now, we’ve had to say that your answer to these questions was an unambiguous no at the very least if you wanted your site to rank high in results of a search. Google’s longstanding disdain for poor-quality, spammy websites implies that the majority of text generated by machines does not make the grade. Prior web publishers’ guidelines explicitly warned against the use of automated content of any kind and severe penalties being that are inevitable for any fake text found to be fake.
However, the search giant’s guidelines have been modified in a subtle but significant manner. Instead of banning auto-generated content, Google’s most recent guidelines simply state that there’s an issue with content made with the intention of “manipulating search rankings” instead of being used by human beings.
In a clearer shift, the focus is currently on “spams,” auto-generated content that is not able to pass crucial quality tests and was designed to feed spiders of search engines but has very little or no value to users themselves. Google spokesperson Danny Sullivan has stated that the problem is one of the quality and utility of the content, as poor content is viewed with suspicion on whether it was created in large quantities by untrained writers and crafted by traditional cookie-cutter processes or created with the latest AI technology.
AI-generated content will not be a problem if it is able to meet the needs of the searcher by being precise, well-written, and offering a valuable answer to the question. As long as the result of the search appears attractive, the origin of the text seems to be insignificant.
However, the greater integration of AI technology into the engines will mean that keyword-laden, artificially generated, mass-produced content will be much easier to spot and penalize, while high-quality content will rank highly regardless of how it was produced.
The Upshot for Content Marketers and Writers
AI-generated content isn’t likely to leave the field shortly. It’s just too great and too affordable for content-hungry marketers as well as search engines to leave out. While AI technology has already proven impressive, it has significant issues to address. As the embarrassing public scandal of Google has proven, AI bots still can’t be trusted for their accuracy.
Equally crucial from the perspective of a marketer Bots aren’t able to create the emotional impact that’s important for engaging humans and making them customers. High-quality, human-written content is still a distinct advantage, currently in the advancement of AI-generated tools for content creation.
With AI technology’s future vision at the forefront, the most important job of marketers and writers is to incorporate this innovative technology into their processes. AI can enhance existing techniques and tools to improve research speed and simplify the initial process of creation before real writers apply the human element to elevate the AI-generated content to the next level. Without the final step of human approval and improvement, even the most impressive AI outputs will probably be considered filler rather than a catalyst for conversions or an engine for regular readers.
Viewed from this perspective, artificial intelligence-generated content could turn out to be an invaluable tool for marketers and writers rather than an adversary to be feared. If properly integrated into the human-driven creation process, artificial intelligence will eventually allow for faster, easier, and cheaper writing of compelling articles on any subject while simultaneously being able to pass the search engines’ quality tests to gain profitable rankings.
If you’re a marketer, a writer, a journalist, or someone else who is involved in content creation, this opportunity should be highly welcomed.
