ChatGPT, Bard & SEO: Is There a Future for AI Content and Search?

This post was originally used as a client-facing POV, written by myself in March 2023, for Jellyfish.

What is ChatGPT?

A few days after Thanksgiving in the U.S., there was a disturbance in the world of AI-Generated Content. On November 30th, OpenAI - a San Francisco-based AI research company - launched ChatGPT. In only a few days, the tool attracted over one million users. From tech heads to journalists, content writers, and SEO specialists, everyone wanted a shot at the story-creating bot, the most advanced (publicly) of its kind to date.

What makes ChatGPT so impressive? By crawling an ever-expanding database, the bots behind this tool can generate a range of content, from simple one-line tags to full-length TV and movie scripts. The creators of ChatGPT designed the bots to mimic real conversations, remember earlier conversations for context, explain complex topics, and "even apologize when it gets things wrong."

Depending on what prompts one asks ChatGPT, the responses may seem instantaneous. In contrast, others will take a few seconds to populate. Overall, the tool still pulls information from its vast database, powered by content all over the web, then refurbished it into “unique” responses. 

Google Bard - Still “in the works” but a true competitor to ChatGPT

Google's Bard, released less than 2 months following ChatGPT’s intro, intends to be an “AI search engine” based on the Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA). Bard is trained on a dataset called Infiniset consisting of public dialog data and web text–English language Wikipedia, code documents, web documents, non-English web documents, and dialogs data from public forums–all more up-to-the-minute than ChatGPT’s information.

Google has not gone into specifics of how search results will be displayed, but an image from Google’s blog showed what Bard results may look like:

Concerns and Limitations on the power of ChatGPT, Bard, and AI

The precision of results from ChatGPT and its artificially intelligent content has produced quite a stir across multiple industries. Higher education schools are already worried students will use this tool to produce full-term papers. Content writers and website developers are concerned that human-like articles and auto-generated code will take over their industries. And those in the SEO industry have already been cautious about recommending using AI content, even before the power of ChatGPT came into focus.

Google and its parent company, Alphabet, issued a "red alert" explaining that ChatGPT and AI content may one day replace search engines. Why search for something when you can ask an AI-bot? This was quickly followed by the release, and failed initial public testing, of Bard.

These are valid concerns as AI content will continue to evolve. In The near future, what these bots produce can be seen as a guide for ideas. However, with so many caveats, ChatGPT is far from the perfect replacement for an expertly curated SEO strategy or content development.

Caveat: Plagiarism abound?

One key factor is that ChatGPT creates“new” responses or documents based on prompts by crawling countless bits of existing content across the web. The tool is trained on trillions of data from the Internet. It uses a “machine learning technique called Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), in which human trainers provided the model with conversations in which they played both the AI chatbot and the user.” While not technically stealing, the bots are basing outputs on existing content humans wrote.

Caveat: Google’s anti-AI content policies

Throughout 2022, Google Released several comments on using AI-generated content and a global algorithm update (Helpful Content Update), aiming at both SEO-only focused copy and bot content on websites. 

Google's John Mueller wrote about ChatGPT, "I don't know if AI is the right approach to making titles & descriptions, but if you're running out of ideas, and especially if you see pages showing up in search for the wrong terms, it seems like a good way to get inspiration, or to try new things out. I would strongly discourage blindly following it though: you know your audience much better than any tool."

Caveat: ChatGPT User Experience - Still very much in a ‘beta’ phase

While there’s no doubt ChatGPT is an extraordinary tool, it still leaves something to be desired as far as user experience and access. Currently, the tool’s popularity causes users to be locked out more frequently than ever. Unable to handle the mass amount of inquiries every hour of every day from around the world, the tool is difficult to access during many peak hours. 

OpenAI is testing membership options (potentially named ChatGPT Professional), in order to pay for the massive overhead from extreme amounts of data and energy their tool uses up. 

Caveat: Self-imposed limitations to question types & outputs

Google’s announcement of Bard was followed by Microsoft’s announcement of its own AI-driven update to Bing using ChatGPT and OpenAI. Yet, after only a few days of live activity, the AI provided multiple inappropriate answers to questions (including several where the AI wished to become sentient - nothing to worry about there we’re sure), followed by the limiting of outputs, as well as the types of answers shrinking in length and depth.

ChatGPT & SEO

Can AI-Generated Content Help with SEO?

The short answer - “Yes, but…” 

ChatGPT may be the latest, most advanced form of AI content, but it’s nothing new in the world of SEO. Various tools over the past few years have been built to help generate “SEO content ideas” as well as platforms that can identify bot-developed copy or AI-generated (unintentional) plagiarism. Aside from OpenAI, there have been multiple solutions in the marketplace using AI to write automated content.

While it’s not a great idea to try and utilize AI-generated content from a tool like ChatGPT to post fully on-site, there’s several areas where it can assist in fundamental SEO tasks.

Keyword Research – Expand upon new or existing keywords by prompting ChatGPT to give examples of keywords (by intent or semantic link) along with a seed list.

Metadata – Similarly, you can utilize AI for title tag or meta description inspiration…but don’t just copy and paste. Rework the pieces that an AI tool gives you, and make sure they are QA’d by someone familiar with SEO best practices.

On-page (e.g. Headings, Product descriptions) – Similarly to its use for metadata inspiration, find ideas for lists like FAQ content or other informational pieces (listicles, etc.) using topics provided by AI…but again, don’t copy/paste. Review, Rework, and QA before posting live - and reach out to your Content and SEO teams.

In Closing

“You could argue that this is simply the future and will save us all time. But this reasoning has a fundamental flaw; search engines will, regardless of how good AI is, still rely on content. The AI engine needs to learn from somewhere and continuously be updated with new information to stay relevant. AI isn’t experiencing anything, humans are.“ - Jacob Ferus 

When it comes to AI-generated content, ChatGPT is certainly advanced. Google is even preparing to release its own AI-prototype dubbed “Sparrow” as a direct competitor of ChatGPT for the search landscape.

Still, Google and many others are clear on AI’s ability to create (or rather, not) quality, “human” content. Per Search Quality Guidelines: “the automatic creation of thousands of pages by running existing, freely available content without any oversight…would not be considered to have human effort.”

Danny Sullivan, Google's Public Search Liaison, has stated, "...when asked about AI, content created primarily for search engine rankings, however it is done, is against our guidance. If content is helpful & created for people first, that's not an issue."

Worries about its scaling of content, SEO, or development work are valid, but also most certainly years off from being reliable on a continuous basis. For SEO, we know that ChatGPT is just one of many potential tools when it comes to creating superior copy and technical recommendations that speak to audience needs.