This past November, we recorded a special episode of EDGE of the Web — no, not like A Very Special Episode of Blossom or Family Ties — from the stage at brightonSEO. Originally an annual SEO conference in Brighton, England, it debuted in the US in sunny San Diego, California. We were lucky enough to pull in a panel of experts to talk about The Future of SEO: AI to SGE.
The energy was great, and we had some really smart people on stage, including Ola King, Cindy Krum, Julia McCoy, JR Oakes, Mordy Oberstein (EDGE of the Web’s co-host), and Erin Sparks (our host and CEO of Site Strategics).
This distinguished panel talked about the future of SEO and how it’s changing; how and whether AI content should be labeled and attributed; and how Google is expanding its knowledge graph to better understand people, authors, and websites to determine trustworthiness.
How to Maintain Creative Control When Using AI
Jumping right into the discussion, Erin asked the panel, “How can we maintain creative control when using AI to operate at scale?”
Julia McCoy said that one thing they do at her company, Content at Scale, is to focus on optimizing AI content, and calling it AIO. She encouraged listeners to “think about AI as your new workflow assistant.”
AI can help writers through an acronym Julia calls CRAFT — Cut the fluff, Review your content, Add images, Fact check, and Trust build. The problem with AI right now is that AI-generated content is hitting the web, but it’s not very good, accurate, truthful, or fact-based.
Julia said that if you already know this, you can get ahead of what is coming and adapt to how we do things. Writers need to learn to use AI, or they’ll be replaced by the people (and AI systems) who do.
Mordy pointed out that AI can be useful for writing and rewriting things that have been done before. For example, why would you want to write an article on how to change a tire? This has been written a million times over, so why would you have a human writer write that article? That’s something you can let AI manage for you while the human writers can delve a little deeper and focus on more creative endeavors.
Instead, you can dig a little deeper and focus on topics like “Which tire should I use?” or “What tires are suited for the cold Indiana climate if you live in hilly southern Indiana?”
Erin wrapped up the discussion saying, “AI can be used for a glut of content that people don’t care about. As much as we’re going to try to fight the good fight, are we going to be completely overrun with benign content?”
He speculated that Google is going to homogenize informational content at some level where, if we have 5,000 articles on how to change your tire, Google will provide the answer without referring users to a particular web page.
Experience is the Future of Content
Instead, the best content is going to be experience. If you can provide something that is an experience that is engaging and provides real value, it’s hard for a language model to copy that.
“We’ve seen the SERP get cannibalized with more and more factual data that Google doesn’t believe you need to go to a destination to see,” Erin said. “If our content’s not useful to actually send the user to, the logical next step is to create some contextual level of relevancy around that.”
Ola King agreed with Erin’s assessment, saying that content needs to be more personalized. Rather than going after keywords with a lot of volume, the content should focus on people first. And if you’re going to do that, you need to focus on your website.
He said that if you have a website that focuses on changing tires, there are so many nuances to changing tires, the types of tires, and so on, you should focus on creating content that doesn’t have a lot of searches. And because your entire site is focused on just this one topic, you’re able to get value from that. You can send people on a journey where one search turns into ten different interactions with your content.
Mordy echoed Ola’s sentiments saying that Google will try to filter searchers to those deeper topics. For example, how do I change a tire if X, Y, and Z are true? What if I’m stranded? What if it’s dark? What if I’m on a busy highway?
Google’s new algorithms, called multi-unified modals, will fundamentally change search engine rankings, and this is where content marketers have the ability to write that deep content and to get traffic that’s meaningful and in a way that AI can’t.
Should AI Content Be Labeled As Such?
Erin then asked our illustrious panel whether AI-generated content should be labeled as such. Or should it be presented as if it was authored by a human expert? He cited examples in the news within the last year of a lot of content being published without the guidance of human expertise. In one instance, Sports Illustrated created fake personalities (“Drew Ortiz”) and published AI-generated content under this byline.
Julia said she believes that, in the end, Google doesn’t care how the content was created, they care that it helps and serves the end user. An argument can be made, she said, that labeling something as AI-generated can detract from the user experience.
However, she counter-argued, this idea really only applies to text-based content; video and audio are a completely different game because of deep fakes, and that can get platforms into trouble. In September 2023, TikTok launched an AI video generator for their platform and said that if people upload AI-generated videos, they have to label them as such, or the creators can get into trouble with the platform.
While some people may believe that this shouldn’t apply to written content, the federal government disagrees: At the end of last October, President Biden signed an executive order that, among many other issues, directed the Department of Commerce to “develop guidance for content authentication and watermarking to clearly label AI-generated content.”
Cindy Krum suggested that marketers slap labels on their written content like “AI-generated,” “AI-assisted,” and “human-generated. Because when you’re building EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness), you want your credibility as a human, not as a fake AI persona.
“And think about your brand,” added Mordy. “Think about what your consumers want.”
Mordy said that marketers should be asking themselves how they can differentiate their brand and what can consumers expect from their content. Rather than focusing on whether Google will like a particular piece or not, think about your content as a corpus, a larger body of work.
When people look at your content across your website, Mordy said, they may see that an article was written by AI, but they like the fact that you were transparent about it. And they’ll feel like they can trust you. So when they find your product page on a random Google search, they’ll trust you because you were completely transparent with your AI content.
There was a lot more great content during the 1-hour and 17-minute panel discussion including:
- The importance of trustworthiness and how EEAT signals deep subject matter expertise.
- How to move into a new area of SEO expertise in an AI age.
- How tools can measure (or struggle to measure success in the context of search-generated experiences.
- The panelists’ hot takes on the future of SEO over the next 18 months.
To hear the entire presentation, including those discussion points, just visit our website.
