Do’s & Don’ts of Using ChatGPT for SEO

The rise of AI content

ChatGPT is an artificially intelligent chatbot, so it can perform much more complex tasks and give quite complex output compared to any other chatbots out there. ChatGPT was officially released in November 2022 to rave reviews, but it has roots dating back to 2018 with the research lab that created it, OpenAI. Microsoft is a very large investor in OpenAI, so ChatGPT is considered to be heavily affiliated with Microsoft. Not long after ChatGPT was released, Google released its own artificially intelligent chatbot called Bard in March 2023, and the response was not nearly as great as it was for ChatGPT. In the coming years, you can expect several more AI chatbots to pop up.

Safe and useful ways to use ChatGPT for SEO

ChatGPT can be a Swiss army knife for any digital marketer or SEO. It can really help speed up your content generation tasks. Whether you are writing a blog post or even ad copy, ChatGPT can generate some great ideas for you. However, the most important part of using ChatGPT for any content you generate will be to go through everything it outputs and edit it to make it your own.
I recommend that you make the following your process if you are using ChatGPT to help you write a blog post:

1. Ask it for specific things – Ask ChatGPT for specific things like generating headings or giving you a paragraph or two on a specific part of your blog post. For example, you can tell ChatGPT to generate a section about the pros and cons of using chatbots for research in a blog post about the evolution of artificial intelligence.


2. Go through the output carefully and make it your own – Go through whatever it returns as an answer for your query and rewrite much of it. Yes, you will still have some work to do here, but it will be much easier and quicker than if you wrote something original yourself.


3. Put the post through Grammarly or Hemingway – After you have made the output completely unique by making it your own, make sure that you check your grammar and clarity. You can easily do this using Hemingway (for free!) or Grammarly (affordable monthly prices).


4. Run what you have at this point through a plagiarism checker – Finally, when you are just about ready to publish your content, run it through a program like Copyscape. Copyscape will search the web for similar content and give you a percentage of the content that can be considered “duplicate content.” If your plagiarism percentage is over ten percent, go back to step two and restart the process from there. Thankfully, you will just have to do that for the duplicate portion of the content, which Copyscape will show you. There are specific programs out there for detecting AI-generated content, but it has been objectively observed that there are a ton of false positives and negatives given from most of these programs.

ChatGPT can also be used for tasks like keyword clustering or suggesting different versions of split-testing experiments for SEO. Although, for things like this, its access to keyword data such as search volume is limited. I use it as a “jumping-off” point to kickstart my creative process.

Dangerous ways to use ChatGPT for SEO

As we mentioned, you should not use anything generated from ChatGPT or any other AI Chatsoftware without editing it heavily first. You need to understand that these programs scrape results from search engines, then combine and modify the results they get in the form of what they output. If several people ask ChatGPT to generate a blog post about “Traveling to Los Angeles,” it’s possible for it to return a very similar output to each of those people. They could be penalized for having “duplicate content” on their sites if they all published the output without editing.
You also should not rely on ChatGPT for any content regarding more recent and topical subjects. ChatGPT can only generate answers with information from 2021 and earlier. This may change, but for now, the information it will use to generate output will be dated by a couple of years.

What ChatGPT means for the future of search

AI technology like ChatGPT may very well be the future of search. If the technology continues to be updated and evolve, no longer will an end-user have to scroll through Google and Bing to find the answer they are looking for. Google seems to believe this too. Since ChatGPT was released in November 2022, Google has had some of its biggest and most volatile updates ever occur. The period since ChatGPT’s release has also seen the highest amount of combined confirmed and unconfirmed Google updates ever. This is all in addition to Google’s clearly rushed release of its own AI chatbot, Bard.