Using ChatGPT content in my website blog: is it a good idea?
In this article:
Is it a good idea to use AI, Deepseek or ChatGPT content in my website blog?
Can AI or ChatGPT content help boost the SEO of my website?
How can I use AI or ChatGPT for my website blog in an ethical way?
This article is from one of our recent Content Corners: Content Corner is our weekly Q&A (on Instagram) to help you create great website content that attracts, engages & boosts your SEO.
Got a website, but no traffic or enquiries? Content is the key. We answer your questions on blogging, blog topics, structuring blog articles, improving existing blogs & tracking your progress…
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Is it a good idea to use AI, Deepseek or ChatGPT content in my website blog?
ChatGPT exploded onto the scene in late 2022, ushering in a new age of AI. It's transformed how we approach content plus use digital platforms.
In terms of content marketing, blogging and website blogs, people quickly realised that ChatGPT could produce what appears to be passable written material and do it at pace. Things ballooned from there.
The logical next step was to generate lots of blog and web content using AI-generated content - the hope being it would provide a quick and easy way to boost SEO and search engine ranking positions.
While AI tools can be very helpful, such as saving time or making workflows more efficient, you need to be very, very careful when applying them to your blog and website content.
The reason for this is because Google wants to make its search results as helpful and useful as possible to its users. It does this by crawling your website and then indexing it. Based on how relevant and helpful it judges your content to be, you get your search ranking position.
The problem with ChatGPT is that it creates a lot of what's called slop. By slop we mean low-quality, bland, pointless and vague content; content that generally uses a lot of words to say very little; all filler and no killer.
If we consult Google's documentation which is ever clear and helpful, it's upfront about AI-generated content. Google wants to reward original, high-quality content that demonstrates what it calls E-E-A-T: expertise, experience, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. Note that Google uses the word 'reward', so is active in its intent to promote great website content.
In overview, no, it is not a good idea to use AI or ChatGPT content in your website blog, and we'll go into the specifics of that in the next question below.
Read more: Video or words: which is better for website & blog SEO?
Can AI or ChatGPT content help boost the SEO of my website?
AI generated content can be dangerous, harmful, misleading and annoying.
It's no wonder that Google has moved to tackle AI and ChatGPT: search results full of rubbish AI content doesn't make for happy users, and that would then damage Google's commercial interests
What we've seen over the last few months is that Google has responded to the advent of ChatGPT and other AI tools by cracking down on this poor quality AI content. It's done this to ensure that the user experience is preserved because the inferior AI content hasn't served to help answer people's cares and questions.
Google has basically updated its search algorithms and subsequently downgraded or flattened the search ranking positions of offending websites. If you're a business that has hitherto relied on organic search traffic for enquiries or sales, I imagine that this change has been devastating.
If you're tempted to use AI tools and ChatGPT to create content for your blogs, publish it and think that Google won't notice, it will, it really will - I can't emphasise this enough. For the sake of your SEO and website performance, please don't rely on raw AI content.
In terms of Google’s guidance on AI content, it’s primarily interested in how high the quality of the content is - the higher the better, regardless of how it’s produced. As we mentioned above, this is why you should focus on injecting expertise, experience, authoritativeness and trustworthiness into your content.
Where you need to be careful is automation and attempting to game Google’s search results: ‘using automation - including AI - to generate content with the primary purpose of manipulating ranking in search results is a violation of our spam policies.’ This is why ranking positions have suffered where sites have willingly or unwittingly relied on AI content.
It's really important that you use these tools wisely, tailoring how you use them to your content. And I'm going to talk a bit about how we can do that in the next question.
In summary, no, AI or ChatGPT won't automatically help boost the SEO of your website unless you first understand Google’s commitment to helpful, reliable, people-first content. If you use the words they generate straight out of the box, you're wasting your time and won't see any improvement in your SEO performance.
Read more: How to structure a blog post for better SEO & engagement
How can I use AI or ChatGPT for my website blog in an ethical way?
As a general rule, I think it's good to be aware of and evaluate the latest tools on the market, whether that's for your website or elsewhere. We can use the newest and best tools available to help us in our businesses. No one would imagine going back to the days before e-mail, but I think we can agree that e-mail has its limitations in communication!
When it comes to AI ChatGPT, my rule of thumb is don't use raw AI content for your blog. Instead, I recommend using AI tools within the process of generating ideas and refining content that you've already produced off your own back.
Don't use AI tools to produce fresh content and pass that off as your own - this will eventually negatively impact your SEO, plus I think you'll find you as a human and your brain can produce better content if you apply consistently to creative endeavours. As an aside, that's a key downside to AI - it erodes your ability to think.
More specifically, you could use AI or ChatGPT to help produce a pool of ideas relating to a particular topic. You can then choose, refine and develop the chosen idea into a fully-fledged blog that is written by you in your tone of voice. AI tools are helpful for synthesising and summarising large amounts of information, so this brainstorming part is a good way to to harness its power.
Another way to use an AI tool is to create a helpful summary of some content that you've written already, such as a key takeaways section, ‘too long, didn’t read’ executive summary or a meta description for a page. Meta descriptions for blogs or webpages can often cause people problems because of their character limits. Meta descriptions are the short snippets that are displayed in a search results on Google. The challenge with them is that space is quite limited: your character count is 150 to 160, after which it loses effectiveness.
If you've already written your blog post, you can ask ChatCPT to analyse your content and give you the basis for the meta description. Obviously makes sure you then review the suggestion and rewrite or rework it if necessary. Above all, make sure that it has your tone of voice: AI content is quite noticeable for it’s bland, soulless quality.
Another example is alt text for images. Alt text is the text that accessibility readers use to convey an image to users who are not able to view it. It also acts as the fallback text in case the browser is unable to load an image. An AI tool like ChatGPT is able to scan an image and provide an impartial description of what's going on. Whereas a human can be tempted to stuff unwanted keywords in the alt text or focus on the wrong thing, an AI tool has the ability to be more objective.
If you are still unsure about using AI content, make sure you read Google’s guidance on Creating helpful content: it talks about the who, how and why of content, which is a good handrail to ensure your content stays on track.
To recap, AI tools like ChatGPT are incredibly helpful, but they come with some significant caveats. Don't rely on raw AI content. Use it to facilitate generating ideas; to help refine content that you produce that's original.
Read more: How content adjacent blogging can revolutionise your SEO
