You Are Wasting Your Time Using AI to Create Content

Yes, AI helps you come up with ideas.

And, AI helps you create content faster.

And yes, we have an AI writer at Ubersuggest (and I will go into how I use AI later in this article… but still…)

But if you use AI to write your content, in most cases you will get less traffic.

Let me break down some stats…

AI VS Humans

With AI we found that it can’t just whip up content that you can publish and be off and to the races.

It still takes time to use AI.

From modifying the content to putting it in your CMS to adjusting the format, creating content takes time whether you use AI or not.

Here’s how long it takes to create content using AI versus a human.

When using AI we found that you can write content, post it into a CMS, and publish it all within 16 minutes.

Humans on the other hand took an average of 69 minutes.

But there are some issues that most people don’t talk about.

The first is AI takes what’s on the web and “regurgitates” the same old info.

People want to read something new…

The second is we found that 94.12% of the time human written content outranked AI-created content.

But if that doesn’t convince you why you are wasting time using AI to create content, look at this experiment we ran.

Traffic Over Time

We decided to run an experiment.

We took 68 websites and created 744 articles. Half with AI and half by humans.

For both batches, we did keyword research and tried to target keywords with a similar keyword difficulty, and similar lengths in content.

On a side note, if you struggle to get AI to write articles at the length you want, just have them write sections at a time.

We then published the articles on these 68 websites and tracked how much organic SEO traffic each article generated on average over time.

Look at the results.

By month 5 an AI article was generating 52 visitors a month while a human-written article was generating 283.

Now I know what you may be thinking…

“Neil, it is easier to crank out content with AI, even if it generates less traffic, just crank out 10 or 100 times more articles and overall you will have more traffic.”

Well, there is an issue with that.

If you put a lot of low-quality or mediocre quality out, you’ll find your overall site decreases in traffic and rankings.

The last time we pruned and cropped our content we saw roughly an 11% to 12% increase in traffic.

Just look at what happened to About.com when they leveraged the same strategy.

Now if that doesn’t convince you, maybe this will.

Look at how much traffic is generated per minute spent.

Either way human content is producing better results.

But Neil, I hate writing I prefer using AI…

If you want to use AI to help create your content, by all means go ahead.

But I recommend that you heavily modify it.

Where an AI writer can be helpful, at least from an SEO standpoint, is that it can help you integrate the right keywords.

That way you can rank for the correct terms and create content that is generating traffic.

So here is how I would use it if I was going to use an AI writer.

Step 1: Head here.

Step 2: Put in your keyword and click “start writing now”.

Step 3: Select the title that resembles the article you want to create.

Step 4: Select the introductory paragraph that most resembles what you are trying to write.

Step 5: Select the headings that you think are most relevant. The tool with pick headings that also contain keywords.

Step 6: The AI writer will produce content for you. It will give you a head start.

Now go and thoroughly modify it.

Make it your own, add in the E-E-A-T, and talk about new stuff that others aren’t sharing.

Where we use AI

The big area we use AI when it comes to content writing isn’t the writing part.

It’s the research part.

For example, at NP Digital we used AI to help UTI boost their traffic.

Instead of AI writing tons of content, we leveraged it to help us do research for all the cities UTI has campuses in.

This allowed us to scale the creation of their local pages, and ensure the quality was high by including data, stats, and other elements that would be useful for someone performing a local search.

We even won an award for the work we created from the Drum Awards.

Conclusion

AI can be used to help you, the issue is most marketers are relying on it to fully create their content for them.

AI is great, but it’s not there yet to just do everything for you.

And even if AI was perfect, if it doesn’t talk about something new that people haven’t seen before it won’t produce the results you are looking for.

So, are you using AI to create your content?