SEM: 4/12/23 (Daily SEO News)

does a high probability of a piece of content being AI-generated correlate with worse rankings?

Hello!

This is SEM: your daily SEO inspiration, where I curate/summarize one valuable item related to SEO and send it your way M-F.

~

Jon Gillham from Originality.ai (an AI content detection tool) recently published a large case study with some interesting implications around AI content and rankings.

They looked at the top 20 SERPs across 1,000 different keywords and ran the content through their AI detection tool to see if there were any interesting trends.

Here are the three takeaways from the study:

ONE – Websites with higher human content scores, as found by Originality.ai AI Detector, have better Google Search rankings.

TWO – A 1% higher Originality.ai human content score corresponds to an improvement of 2.65 positions in Google ranking. This finding is very intriguing, but like with all SEO correlation studies, this link does not prove causation.

THREE – The correlation stops above 75%… meaning there is a marginal benefit in scores above 75% according to this study.

My Take:

I think AI detection tools are interesting, but ultimately measuring something that, on its own, has limited meaning. It’s like spending a lot of effort to make your site have a high DR (domain rating, an Ahrefs statistic, or DA or Trust Flow or whatever metric) just for the sake of having a high DR, instead of understanding that having a high DR is a byproduct of running a high quality site or building relationships within an industry and leveraging those relationships for editorial link opportunities, etc.

If your content is high quality but helpful, it probably doesn’t matter if it is identified as AI. For the results of this study I would argue sites that are ranking well for a set of keywords are most likely part of a huge media brand one way or the other, and have huge staffs that write, review, and edit content, so of course it scores as more human than AI.

A tool like Originality.ai is likely helpful in being used as one step in a multi-part quality control process: these tools seem to measure (at least with my dumb-dumb understanding of how they work) predictability. And human-written-content is, at its best, surprising and unpredictable. At least, it SHOULD be.

BTW, here’s my AI detection score from Originality.ai for the “my take” section of this article:

You’re god damned, right.

~

That’s it for today’s newsletter. Check out some of my current favorite resources/tools:

Resources And Recommendations

Content At Scale (AI content engine):

🦾 one of the best AI content generators, they’ve built a few additional layers of NLP on top of the direct AI output to create pretty solid push-button articles (though I’d still recommend an editing pass or three). Get 20% more credit by signing up through this (aff) link.

Smash Digital (link building):

🔗 I used to work at Smash—and still write a monthly SEO column for them, so I know first hand the high quality links they can build. For serious businesses only, check them out here (and tell them I sent you).

A Weekly(ish) Longform SEO Newsletter:

📖 It’s me, I’m the weekly-ish writer. Check out my newsletter, Rank Theory, for "emerging theories, illuminating experiments, and occasional shitposting."

~

Thanks for reading!

Until tomorrow…

Sean Markey
sem@seanmarkey.com

PS — LMK what you thought of this quick SEO email. Good? Bad? A “tour-de-force?” I’d love to hear from you.

PPS — if you see something interesting that you want me to cover (or you are just trying to get more readers on your SEO article—IDC as long as its good) hit reply and send me tips/tricks/articles you’d like to see me write about.