Our world continues to prioritize and crave instant gratification. Completing a job faster, never waiting for loading times, and increasingly shorter attention spans while watching content have all contributed to the rise of AI use, pushing human-written content to the wayside. One thing that we know for sure is that AI can generate answers in a matter of seconds, which makes it appealing to many industries, including marketing. AI can generate dozens of web pages, blogs, and location-specific articles in under an hour. While this may sound appealing if you are short on time, what effect does sacrificing human-written content have in the long term?
At PDM, we have seen that human-written content can take time because of research, accuracy checks, and client-specific requirements. While AI may be able to help develop content and websites faster, we know just how important the human touch truly is. Let’s look a little deeper at some recent research that looked at how AI content and human content rank over multiple months.
The Results
This blog specifically will look at two experiments conducted by Neil Patel and Search Engine Land. Neil Patel’s experiment looked at the traffic on AI and human content over 5 months, while Search Engine Land looked at a 16-month period.
Over the 5 months, the research shows human content outperformed AI, but the traffic also continued to increase consistently on human-written articles. For example, an AI article during month one generated around 28% traffic while the human content generated 71%. At the end of the 5 months, human traffic reached 283% while the AI only reached 52%. The human-generated content they were tracking also drew in 4.10 visitors for every minute spent on writing, compared to 3.25 visitors per minute for the AI content.
What this shows is that even though AI is obviously faster, the time spent on a quality piece of content provides better long-term results for your website. Even though your content writers may need about 90 minutes to fully develop a piece of content, this can result in a monumental amount of continuous visitors to your website.
Search Engine Land started by purchasing 20 new domains with no brand recognition or backlinking. Each domain focused on a different niche and had multiple long-tail keywords that had minimal competition. These all received 100 pieces of AI-generated content and were simply left untouched after they were published. Months 2 and 3 had continuous growth, even without any SEO tactics, but by month 3 through 6, the impressions collapsed, leading to only 3% of pages remaining in the top 100. By month 16, impressions were minimal.
Their research also tested how adding new content could impact the overall site and old content. Adding new AI content and letting Google index the pages did temporarily boost older posts, but not the newly published ones. These results may look promising at first, but they don’t guarantee lasting gains.
The Human-Written Content Results In Continuous Traffic
Both of these experiments showed that AI content may not be completely useless, but they are not enough to drive users to your site consistently. Content written by professional writers will be a significant time investment, but it tends to pay off over the long-term existence of your site. AI falls short on nuance, empathy, and connections, which many readers need when looking for answers or someone to complete a service around their home. The human touch results in a better reputation for your business while also helping you reach more visitors and customers than ever before.
Examples Of When Human Outranks AI
Utilizing AI as a tool for writing can help make your team more efficient and faster, but the bulk of your content should be written by a human. As shown in this blog, human content outranks AI in the long-term, but at the beginning, they may not always produce the same results.
Human content that ranks well right off the bat includes:
- Industry analysis articles
- Interviews or news articles
- Local landing pages
- How-to guides
- Troubleshooting help
- Medical or legal information
Examples Of When AI Outperforms Humans
There may be small pieces of content that rank better when using AI because of how common AI searches are today. Adopting some AI practices can help your website remain relevant in the changing marketing landscape.
When AI content may help you rank better, include:
- Product descriptions
- FAQs
- Creating graphs or tables
- Drafting or structuring a blog or webpage
Working With Performance Driven Marketing
Performance Driven Marketing has a team of dedicated professional writers who will work on your content, creating quality articles that are thoroughly researched. Our team has created thousands of pieces of content for websites, blogs, and location ranking for all of our clients. PDM serves a variety of industries with SEO websites that continue to provide new clicks and clients. Give us a call at 801-326-0582 to speak with one of our account managers about how we can boost your website.