AI content doesn’t work. It’s something I’ve felt in my bones since I first noticed people casually saying, “Just use AI to write it.” I couldn’t say why; I just felt it deep in my gut. This stuff isn’t good, I’d think, but the subject matter experts reviewing it would shrug and say, “Well, it’s accurate.”
Here’s the thing: accuracy matters, but if you’re going for long-term organic search traffic to your website, what matters even more is creativity. Usefulness. Human point of view. Sure, the content must be accurate. After all, nobody wants to read an inaccurate how-to article. But at the end of the day, content must be engaging. It must offer us a new viewpoint or expand into new areas of thought. If you’re just regurgitating the same old, same old, your content has little value.
Google Ranks Original Content More Favorably
Google has always looked for certain quality signals when choosing which web pages to display first in search results. SEO experts refer to these signals by the acronym: E-E-A-T. These letters stand for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.
Does the author have the experience? The expert, hands-on knowledge needed to write about the topic? What about authority – what authority signals does the author have online? How can we trust the author’s knowledge?
This is why websites shifted to ‘expert author’ bios several years ago. I used to write extensively for some of the larger websites that have categories for every topic under the sun. Today, the content they continue to publish with my byline is business and gardening, and they love sticking my Master Gardener credentials after my name. It’s the little signals that they’re going for, and for good reason: Google pays attention to them.
AI-Generated Content Doesn’t Produce Results, and the Data Shows It
Search Engine Land published a study by Bogdan Bobiak and SE Ranking that found that AI-generated content does not support an effective, long-term SEO strategy. The big question: Can generative AI produce large volumes of content that rank and perform well in search?
SE Ranking purchased 20 new domain names in unique industries. They then fed 100 long-tail keywords into an AI content platform to produce 100 articles per domain, for a total of 2,000 AI-generated articles. They published them and examined the results.
Here are the numbers:
Initial Results (Month 1)
- 71% of articles indexed — surprisingly high for zero‑authority domains.
- ~120,000 impressions
- 244 clicks
Six‑Month Results
- 706,328 impressions
- 1,062 clicks total
- Performance plateaued early and stayed flat.
- Roughly 1 click for every 2 articles.
Sixteen‑Month Results
- An additional 300,000 impressions and ~381 clicks.
- Total after 16 months:
- 1,092,079 impressions
- 1,381 clicks
AI Content Fails the Google Quality Test
According to the study’s author, as quoted in his Search Engine Land article previously cited,
“Google indexed most pages quickly, but without authority, unique insight, or trust signals, rankings collapsed within months.”
Why Human-Created Content Succeeds While AI-Generated Content Fails
Here’s what my gut recognized long ago when I read AI-generated content, and why I believe human-created content succeeds for long-term SEO success:
- People add creative insights to existing topics. That’s why we can have hundreds of new gardening articles published each year. It’s not that the authors invent new gardening techniques; the way I grow lettuce is pretty much how lettuce has been grown for the past hundred years. What human garden writers add to the topic is their unique expertise, their creative expression. This is not something AI can do. It can tell you how much sunlight and water lettuce needs, but not why you love growing it.
- Human expression is valuable. AI degrades that value. Decades ago, when I began my writing career, I read a book by Brenda Ueland, a noted writing instructor. She said, “Everyone is valuable and has something interesting to say,” and I believe this statement with my whole heart. No two people express the same thing in the same way. Two people can stand in front of a Monet painting and see something different; two people can sit next to one another at a concert and hear something completely unique to them. This is what makes artistic expression so powerful. It is what makes us human. AI strips this out. It cannot feel or express; it can only iterate. AI produces smooth, grammatically correct copy that includes many ideas, but it has no way to make us feel, to see through its eyes, because it has none. The content falls flat. It adds nothing of value. People recognize it first and don’t click through to read the articles; Google eventually catches on.
- AI has its place, but not as a creator – as an efficiency partner. I am not anti-AI. I am pro-efficiency. Using AI judiciously – to research, outline, or reword a bumpy sentence – is the same as using a power drill to screw pieces of wood together. Sure, you can use a hand-crank drill and laboriously screw the same two planks together. The tool doesn’t make the final work good or bad. It speeds it along. The same goes for AI platforms. They can help the work of creativity go faster, but they cannot and should not replace creativity.
Of course, you may say that as a writer, which I am, and a content marketer and marketing consultant, which I am also, I have a vested interest in stating that human-written content is superior to AI-generated content. I suppose I do, but I do not see it that way. AI use is not all or nothing, use it or don’t touch it with a ten-foot pole topic. I see it as another tool, the way the IBM Selectric typewriter replaced my mom’s manual Royal typewriter on my desk, and eventually a PC replaced a typewriter. I’m still writing; only the tools have changed, each one making my ability to write faster and easier.
I do believe that more studies will demonstrate what this single study shows us: that AI-generated content does not produce good search engine traffic. It makes us feel we are efficient and doing all the right things, but it is not getting the right results.