Why AI and LLM’s Like ChatGPT are Terrible at Writing SEO Articles

Addison Best
4 min readMay 31, 2024

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You probably already have a strong opinion. The truth is, LLM’s and AI are both terrible and amazing at writing articles.

How can both be true and why is AI terrible at SEO writing?

If you ever tried prompting ChatGPT to write something for you, you probably went through an initial euphoria about how amazing it was, and then got freaked out about what just happened.

But after things settled down, you probably found that you didn’t actually use much of the content it created even though it was “amazing content”.

After reading the AI generated writing, you probably realized although it pumped out a story, poem, or article that was grammatically correct and sounded good, there was something about all of it that was seriously lacking.

A lot of people hear the terms “AI”, “LLMs”, “machine learning” and then quickly tune out because they don’t want to learn the complicated technical details and how they work. But in order to understand why the AI content had an issue, you need to have a basic understanding of how it was created.

So please keep reading because I’m going to quickly explain and show you how LLM’s work and why this would obviously be terrible for content and SEO unless you understand how to use it properly.

So let’s do an AI crash course with an explanation for normal people.

What is Machine Learning?

Machine Learning (ML) is a type of artificial intelligence that allows computers to learn from data and improve their performance over time without being directly programmed.

What are LLMs?

Large Language Models (LLMs). This is what is used to power the GPT part of ChatGPT These are a part of machine learning focused on understanding and generating human-like text. They are trained on tons of information and use complex algorithms to predict and generate text.

So they are essentially trained from existing content that has already been created. This point is key.

AI generated content factory equals duplicate content
AI Created Content is equal to Duplicate Content

Content Creation with LLMs

When you ask an LLM to create content, it uses the patterns it has learned to generate new text.

For example, if you ask it to write a blog post about gardening, it can produce a well-structured and informative piece based on its training data. This content is good but very similar to what already exists, and of course not unique

AI is great at essentially regurgitating and recycling content that is already out there. If you try creating all of your website articles with AI generated articles, you might have wondered why, even with tons of “good” content you still get close to zero traffic or sales from the content it created.

This leads us into the reason why AI generated content is a terrible idea for SEO.

AI SEO
AI SEO — NO Traffic

The Issue with LLMs for SEO

The main problem with using LLMs for content creation, especially for SEO, is that the content they generate is almost certainly not unique by the nature of how it was produced. It is essentially duplicate content that will be thrown out of search engines.

If you get ChatGPT to write you a full article, it is very strictly formatted in headings, paragraphs, subheadings etc. and looks like a machine or robot wrote it.

Remember, this article is about why AI is terrible for SEO, but I also said it was amazing at it. You first need to understand the limitations of AI to learn how to work with AI to produce human generated content that is assisted by AI.

AI should help you a ton with SEO and your business but if you don’t understand it at all, it can feel daunting and you may get tricked and use AI content generators blindly and wonder why you are doing terribly in search results.

This will be a multi article series, so if you are serious about learning how to use AI to actually grow your business and improve your life, follow me on Medium and sign up below to my free AI channels. We will be showing you all the tips, tools, and strategies to grow your business with AI

I’d love to hear what you think about this in the comments.

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Addison Best
Addison Best

Written by Addison Best

AI Educator & Software Developer | Podcaster | Co-founder of 88Herbs | AI Course Instructor at Udemy | AI Growth Hacker @ www.aigrowthguys.com

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