ChatGPT: Will SEO disappear with AI?

On 5 December 2022, Twitter dawned with this devastating thread. It declared, brilliantly, that Artificial Intelligence (AI), with the help of ChatGPT, its, until now, most powerful tool, was going to change the way we do SEO and Digital Marketing forever. In fact, we are clearly facing one of the marketing trends for this year.

Less than two months have passed. The topic, far from stagnating, is on the lips of almost everyone in the SEO and Digital Marketing community.

But, in case you are still not familiar with this tool, here is an update on its main features.

Created on a non-profit basis

OpenAI, the American company that created the phenomenon, advertises itself as “not-for-profit” and is currently valued at over $29 billion.

In November 2021, it already launched its “playground” application to the public (as you previously had to be on a waiting list to access its suite). This is a kind of blank canvas that gave you answers to the so-called prompts or instructions you provided.

Playground was actually a draft of ChatGPT, launched in November 2022, with a much simpler and more intuitive interface.

How does ChatGPT work?

As any chat works, that’s why this tool is being so well received. Its simplicity of use means that you can quickly get to know your way around.

More than one million users are currently training ChatGPT. With your questions, it is feedback and corrected on the basis of all the information provided. 

In addition, users rate whether the answer satisfies their needs. In this way the AI learns and becomes more accurate.

What does Google think about ChatGPT?

At first glance, looking at the development capacity of this tool, the first thing we think is that having an application at hand that is capable of answering any question in a matter of seconds could put an end to Google.

But that moment, if it comes, seems to be a long way off.

ChatGPT currently has obstacles that make it neither as perfect nor as threatening as we might first have thought.

It is not so perfect because, to begin with, it is updated until December 2021. ChatGPT does not know that Spain came third in the 2023 Eurovision Song Contest.

There are many syntax and concordance errors when it is asked to write texts. It requires the data it provides to be checked and the texts it generates to be revised. This correction work will have to be done by a human.

Several companies that started writing texts with AI are now pulling back, as they see that the results are not what they expected.

Would you trust a tool that gives you a single result and gives it to you as credible?

Unlike Google, ChatGPT’s eagerness to save time can be a threat, especially when it comes to topics for which there is no clear goal result.

For this reason, the AI would no longer be “democratizing” the ability to decide on the outcome that best suits the user’s needs.

And although, after the first outburst, opinion about ChatGPT has been calming down, Google is still taking it seriously and has already started to move its machinery.

The first offensive against ChatGPT has been made by announcing that it will launch 20 AI products and a search engine chat in the coming months.

In fact, they have just announced “Sparrow“, still in beta, which, as a differentiating feature compared to ChatGPT, will be able to quote sources.

As Juán González Villa comments in this thread, Google’s priorities include “ensuring that it does not “invent” data, user security and the fight against disinformation”.

In this way, they would be attacking one of the main flaws that ChatGPT suffers from at the moment.

Bing does not want to be left behind

Bing, in this case, and without serving as a precedent, has taken the lead and in March will add ChatGPT to its search engine. 

Microsoft’s search platform accounts for approximately 3% of global searches.

Even if it were to achieve a considerable increase in followers, it would still be a long way behind the giant Google, which has almost 92% of the total market share.

Microsoft has already made an investment of one billion dollars in 2019. Rumors suggest that it will invest a further ten billion. It is clear that it is pulling out all the stops.

The problem is that ChatGPT has brutal maintenance costs. So the question that remains is, will Microsoft be able to cover these costs with the user overtaking its search engine?

Bear in mind that Google is already an AI.

Its refined algorithm is fed by all the content that circulates on the internet and we are still a long way from finding a tool that can overshadow it.

Its millions of daily searches are an example of this, so, taking into account Google’s inertia, together with the upcoming optimisations, it seems that Bing will continue to take a back seat in this fight.

So… Will Google punish AI-generated content?

Because if the giant itself is going to rely on AI products, it would seem a bit of a cheat for it to penalize users for doing so in the first place.

In December 2022, Google already rolled out the Helpful Content Update for all languages.

Its intention was to reward original and helpful content, made “by and for” people.

“As long as the content is useful and created primarily with people in mind, it doesn’t matter if it was generated by an AI”

It thus puts the focus on the purpose of the content. Penalizes content that is created solely for search engines, i.e. it penalizes Black Hat SEO practices. 

It is quite difficult to generate original, useful and valuable content for the user with an AI, since this type of tool. After all, feeds on content that has already been written and published.

You won’t find originality or freshness in ChatGPT. Nor the value of experience or empathy that something written by a person gives you.

ChatGPT doesn’t know its audience the way a person who writes for them does. These are the values that need to be emphasized over the speed or ease with which the AI can do certain types of tasks.

And Google knows this, in fact it has always known this and has gone after spam and worthless text with every update it implements.

So Google really isn’t doing anything it wasn’t doing before the advent of AI or tools like ChatGPT. 

Write relevant, original, fresh content from your own experience, and you stand a better chance of ranking well in search.

And the million dollar question, will SEO disappear with Artificial Intelligence?

After all that has been said in this post, we seriously doubt it will. ChatGPT is an excellent tool to improve the SEO of your website. We will be talking about it for a long time to come.

So, as with any new thing that’s bursting onto the market, it’s best to embrace its potential uses rather than think it will kill your job.

There are many ways to use ChatGPT to optimize certain jobs that, in SEO, are repetitive or redundant.

It can be a great ally to do Keyword Research just like other tools we already use today, but working faster (and for now, for free).

In this example we have done keyword research on the word “coffee makers” and asked ChatGPT to extract the search intentions.

If you have paid tools, this information will be much more complete, as the AI does not have data on search volumes or keyword difficulty.

It can be useful if you do not have such tools or if you want to do a complementary search.

It can also help you determine how difficult it is to rank for, for example, several keywords.

In this example we can see that it is giving an answer that differs from that given by a more reliable (but paid) tool such as Semrush. This tool would place “cafetera dolce gusto” as the most difficult keyword to rank for.

You may be inspired to include user queries in the FAQ section.

You can also use ChatGPT to plan a content strategy. 

Again, as with Keyword Research, it will help you with your task, but it will never do it for you.

There is almost no end to how useful ChatGPT can be for SEO. Both with organic SEO strategies and when setting up a local SEO strategy. We believe that you will experience an improvement in the SEO of your website. But remember, if you do not generate useful and relevant content, Artificial Intelligence will be useless.