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Today’s newsletter is brought to you by Searcheye and is a look at how Spencer from Niche Pursuits is slowly and carefully starting to use “heavily edited” AI content on his massive site.
I published 19 articles assisted by ChatGPT on Niche Pursuits over the past couple of months.
17 of those 19 keywords are now ranked on the 1st page of Google!
I'm not sure I like it, but Google is telling me I should publish more content like this.
A few more details..
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He goes on to say that the articles take 3-4 hours to be produced (!!!) but that it’s been significantly cheaper this way vs. the more traditional way of having a freelance writer do it all. The plan is to allow up to 20% of the content be AI-assisted/written, but to keep 80% human-written.
Coming up: my take on this whole thing. But first, a word from our sponsor:
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Interesting to see a big site with real value to lose share how they are working with AI. It’s one thing for me to put a few articles on my stupid aged domain that I bought for $300 or whatever, but to start integrating it on a site with so much to lose is big-stakes—and super interesting.
I hope he continues to update everyone on how the AI experiment goes (Spencer, please continue to update on how this experiment unfolds!).
I do think there’s a big difference between using “heavily-edited” AI content and just lazily spinning up a (surprisingly solid) article from a tool like On-Page.ai and doing some light editing and publishing that.
The best thing to be doing at this point re: (and the thing I am doing myself) is:
if you have a big valuable site (like NichePursuits) hedge a lot on possible future core updates and tread very slowly and lightly.
if you have a powerful aged domain I think you can be a bit more risky, and try to get all you can out of what you have—this is what I’m doing on one of my main site buildouts at the moment—I’m mixing very well-written human-produced-content with lightly-edited, fact-checked, and very thoroughly rewritten intros, transitions, and conclusions.
if you have domains laying all over the god damned place (like me) just go wild with a few of them. Publish 80 posts a month straight from GPT’s asshole to see what happens, or publish 20 well-researched silos at once using a tool like on-page or content at scale just to see what happens.
Eventually all of your competitors are probably going to be using some form of AI content, so you might as well go hard now before they do to see what kind of marketshare you can take before it happens.
Last thing I’ll say on the matter (and I think this is something Niche Pursuits has in spades): the authoritative author with lots of hot takes and original thoughts PLUS a huge site full of very solid, highly edited AI content that covers the entire topical map is going to be a site that wins in the future.
That’s my bet.
That’s my prediction, and how I’m spending my OWN time and energy building things out at the moment.
Hope that is an interesting thing that helps you form your own theory about where content sites and rankings are heading (until we know for sure).
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Links, Resources, and Recommendations
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PS — LMK what you thought of this quick SEO email. Good? Bad? Sick to death of hearing about AI already? I’d love to hear from you (and thank you to those of you who read and have responded already!)
PPS — Yesterday I recorded a podcast episode from Niche Website Builders—should be out next week! I had a lot of fun and I want to say: if you have a podcast and you’d like to interview me, mr. can’t-even-make-eye-contact-with-the-webcam, hit reply. I’m looking to spread the gospel of aged domains and lazy SEO with the world…
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Saw the podcast through Youtube. Great other site information. Thanks for the do's and don't's about expired domains and building them up.