How will ChatGPT affect SEO and copywriting?

“ChatGPT sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers,” OpenAI claims.

Any news related to ChatGPT gets a lot of attention. This wave of popularity has not gone unnoticed by the SEO community either, and the question arises: how will AI affect content optimization, the writing of texts, and SEO copywriting services overall? Below, we will tell you why the future is not so rosy.

According to our specialists, the widespread use of texts generated by AI, without close monitoring and compliance with strict rules, may lead to negative consequences in the next 6 to 12 months. Some problems include being targeted by spam updates, a significant decrease in organic traffic, and continuous attempts to bring back the previous results. But what is the reason for all that?

Here’s how ChatGPT can violate the rules set by search engines:

• Copyright. ChatGPT: Yes, using ChatGPT-generated output may lead to copyright infringement if it contains protected material such as text, images, or audio without proper authorization from the original creator. It is important to respect the intellectual property rights of others and to obtain necessary permissions before using someone else’s content. If the material is under copyright, it is illegal to reproduce it without the owner’s permission. Violating copyright laws can result in significant legal penalties, including fines and damages. To avoid copyright infringement, it is recommended to use original content or properly licensed material.
• Compromised ethical principles. The only thing ChatGPT does is it processes human knowledge and comes up with a relevant response for you. However, AI’s “understanding” is insufficient to provide truthful information that will correspond to reality. Recent precedents show that ChatGPT can generate a list of fictitious books, write fake financial news, and more. This endangers consumers of this information, their life, health, psychological stability, and financial wealth.

You can learn more about the threats associated with ChatGPT from the research:

“It is not obvious to users that ChatGPT’s answer is ‘random.’ If you use a random answer generator, you know what you’re doing. The capacity to make arguments and the lack of awareness of randomness, make  ChatGPT more persuasive (unless you’re digitally literate, hopefully).”

For this reason, since 2019, Google has implemented the EAT factors (EEAT since 2022) algorithm, which is aimed at analyzing the competence, trustworthiness, and authority of the provided information and the author of the material. These factors are especially important for sites focused on the YMYL (Your Money Your Life) topics, as the information they provide can affect a person’s health and life.

As you can see, the unethical nature of AI directly violates the rules of search engines and raises the question: how will the use of a search engine with ChatGPT affect humanity?

• Spam. The position of Google and other search engines is unambiguous: there should be more high-quality, unique content with a high level of the author’s expertise. The official Google Search blog states, “Using automation — including AI — to generate content with the primary purpose of manipulating ranking in search results is a violation of our spam policies.” It means that we will soon see extreme growth in the number of sites based on AI content, and then Google will announce another update, which will instantly eliminate this traffic.

If you have not seen how quickly and severely an update can affect search results, here is an example from a client who contacted Livepage for an audit after the December 2022 Google Link Spam Update:

• Outdated information. ChatGPT is limited to events that occurred before 2021. Therefore, if you want to be a trendsetter in content marketing and focus on current events and news in your industry, you will have to abandon the idea of using AI.

Does this mean that ChatGPT and other AIs should be avoided like the plague?

The answer is no. It is obvious that technologies are developing and will become more refined each day. For now, we recommend you not follow a new trend blindly but rather analyze and critically consider your steps in marketing. It is better to turn to professionals who know how to use AI tools correctly.

At the same time, AI technology has a promising future. After some upgrades, it will likely become a safe tool for everyday use by the general public.

Also, the current doubts should not become the reason for the complete rejection of AI-based tools. Digital marketing is an extremely fast-changing field, and ignoring new trends can lead to complete elimination from the race to the TOP of search engine results.

Still, can ChatGPT replace an SEO specialist or a copywriter? 

Once again, new technologies lead to discussions about the “funeral” of the SEO industry.

At this moment and in the current stage of AI development, the answer is definitely no. AI cannot replace human expertise, life experience, and the ability to think and find unique solutions to new problems and challenges. Consider ChatGPT a tool, not a turnkey solution.

How does Livepage respond to the popularity of ChatGPT?

Our team could not help but change some processes in our SEO company. We continue to follow the development of AI so that we can quickly adapt to changes.

At this moment:

• We continue to create content for our clients with the help of copywriters because we are responsible for the quality of the content and want to showcase the client’s expertise in each article. It is important for us not only to get ranking positions and traffic but also to create interesting and unique content that will generate leads for the business.
• We check all the texts written by our SEO copywriters for whether they were generated by AI. To avoid sanctions for spam content in the future, we check all copywriters and our team, as well as specialists on the client’s side.

It turns out that ChatGPT uses “invisible watermarks” to mark AI-generated content, and the developers continue to improve this system to make it more difficult to pass AI content off as written by a human.

This means it is already possible to identify texts generated by ChatGPT with the help of AI-detecting services. There are plenty of them available, such as:

1. https://contentatscale.ai/ai-content-detector/?fpr=penguin
2. https://gltr.io/dist/index.html
3. https://writer.com/ai-content-detector/ 

• We use AI tools for the work of SEO specialists, for example, to analyze search requests, analyze audience demand in a niche, etc.