Will AI SEO friendly content soon cease to be an advantage?

With AI a one-person content team can do what a large company like HubSpot can - publish around the clock and create content at scale.

Source: I worked at HubSpot for 6+ years

This is how HubSpot approached content an SEO, their goal was to publish as much as possible and bludgeon Google with content. This worked for them and other very large companies because very few other companies could do it.

Because of this I've developed ways to approach SEO for my clients to think creatively and use their resources smartly, because you need to if you want to succeed. You can't just build a list of keywords from a tool and write a generic blog post about each one. When all your competitors are doing the same thing, it doesn't stand out.

Now though? Anyone can bludgeon Google with content, and it will work... until Google adjusts. When everyone is doing the same thing, then it ceases to work. That's a core principle of good marketing though, tactics work until they don't and in order to succeed you need to think creatively.

Here's how I think marketers can be smart with AI: Use it to publish content quickly and "fail fast". I like to approach SEO like a product team, ship it and learn from it. If it takes you a week to publish a piece of content then that's a lot of investment to learn if you created the right piece of content. But if you can draft and publish content in hours? You can learn very quickly and rapidly iterate on your SEO strategy.

I highly doubt it. There're a ton of benefits from using AI for SEO, like competitive research, keyword research, content outlines — but just because AI-generated content can be SEO-friendly (getting HTML structure correctly, linking to other resources internally, adding anchor text to images, etc.) doesn't neccessarily mean it will be quality content.

I'll take YMYL as an example. I can probably ask ChatGPT to diagnose my headache, and it will probably do a fantastic job outlining symptoms and relevant medical problems, among other things. But I would still go to the doctor's.

There are so many signals to determine high quality content that I just don't think you can cover completely programmatically.

I'd also say that you're not giving professional SEOs a ton of credit. It's not easy to do it right, and I'd take an experienced SEO anyday over some person with a paid subscription to a fancy AI content tool.

That being said, with everyone getting better at content creation, specifically, and SEO, overall, I'd say that this is where people will have to be really creative about how they do certain things. I think search queries are slowly becoming more complicated, and people are also looking outside of Google for search engines, so it will be exciting to see how SEOs/marketers will adapt to this.