If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. So how should AI tools like ChatGPT influence your SEO? Great question. Now, will ChatGPT change SEO, and are there ways that you can leverage this to improve the efficacy of your practices.Yes, and yes. So, let’s get down to it.
To start, we’re in the early days of AI and generative tools like Open AI’s ChatGPT platform changing the way that people handle writing content. As a result, it’s no surprise that, Google followed up with their own version ‘Bard’ and modified their company stance to say, “Hey, guys. AI content isn’t all that bad” but paired it with the disclaimer, “as long as it’s good content.”
Now, Before you go leaning on ChatGPT, Bard, or any other generative AI platform as the cornerstone of your dealership’s marketing, you should know a few things.
First, it says right here on the homepage of ChatGPT that the platform can and will provide information that’s incorrect. That it’s sometimes biased because of the data that it is based on, and sometimes the data set that it is relying on to provide the answers to you is incomplete. So because of these things, that makes ChatGPT a real risk for writing long-form content. Why? Because you’re going to have to review and edit it so carefully (to make sure none of these things creep in) that you’re going to essentially have spent the same time you would have if you were writing it in the first place.
Another thing that we run into with long-form content is hallucinations. Why? Because limitations of the 2021 data set which ChatGPT uses to formulate its responses will lead to gaps in its perceived knowledge and, rather than saying, “I don’t have complete information” it’ll just make something up. The longer the content, the more prevalent these hallucinations may be, and it’s up to you to figure out if something incorrect (or even harmful) has been snuck in. Want an example?
I once had ChatGPT write a piece about the 2023 Ford Mustang Dark Horse. The result? It thought I was asking it to write a fictional story about an anthropomorphic Ford Mustang whose name was ‘Darkhorse’. Now, remember… it wasn’t that it was trying to lie to, or deceive me. It’s just because ChatGPT’s data set is too old to know anything about that model, since it was released 2 years after that data set was last updated. So it just made something up, sent the response through and said, “Here you go, Dave. Happy?”
I wasn’t.
So, then…what is Chat GPT good for? Speaking as the Director of Operations at a Marketing Agency dedicated to SEO, that I primarily use it to generate code snippets for Google sheets and Excel to make them more efficient and organized. That’s probably not a great use case for you, but if you’re looking for a very useful list, check out our ChatGPT workshop here.
Regardless, proceed with caution, but also try it out. You might surprise yourself.
Let’s recap.
AI tools like chat GPT will not replace SEO, but they’ll almost certainly change our relationship with it. Make it a point to understand the strengths and the weaknesses before leaning too heavily on AI for content creation and recognize the importance of the human element in both writing and editing.