How the "AI-Generated Website" Guru Experiments Will Play Out

How the latest SEO trend will die

If you’ve spent any amount of time on SEO Twitter then you’ve noticed that creating an AI-generated website and “documenting the journey” is the latest guru trend.

Spencer Haws @nichepursuits

So, I’m thinking about spamming Google with like 1,000,000 words of AI content. -Buy expired domain with good links + content I’m not convinced Google can detect AI content just yet. Would anyone be interested in following along with this little side project of spamming Google?

The gurus running these experiments are using an AI content tool like Jasper to spin out a massive quantity of articles and posting them on their website instead of hiring writers.

Since I’m not a guru, I’m not going to be running one of these experiments myself. What I can do is give my prediction on how I think the AI-generated website trend will play out.

They will initially be successful

BowTiedTetra | SEO ChadFish @BowTiedTetra

@nichepursuits I predict that it will do better than people think in the short term due to content velocity but will not do well in the long run due to bounce rate + other signs that people think it's low quality

My first prediction is that these websites will see better-than-expected initial results. If you flood a website with content about a specific topic, this will help to establish topical authority, even if the content itself is garbage.

Topical authority refers to the concept of showing Google that you are an expert in your niche by saturating your site with content that is related to and interlinked with other articles. Other than links, it’s the most important ranking factor in SEO.

For this reason, I think that the AI-generated content will rank highly at first once the website has enough content.

Negative user signals will reduce rankings

After the initial surge of success, I predict that the AI website will quickly lose rankings due to information from users indicating that it’s low-quality. User signals include bounce rate, time on site, click-through rate, and other indicators that help Google determine whether actual humans like the content.

The reason that Google uses user data as a ranking factor is because their algorithm can’t actually read your content the way a human can. The Googlebot is instead scanning your content for keywords that match with keywords in the content that it already ranks, anchor text, etc.

Google can not directly tell if you have “high-quality content”.

Instead, it ranks pages that display positive ranking factors that it can directly judge, then relies on data from users to determine whether it made the correct decision.

If people are not clicking through to your content in the SERPs, it will drop in the rankings. If people click on it and immediately bounce out, it will drop. If they aren’t spending any significant amount of time on your site, it will drop.

We’re in the primitive early days of AI-generated content. The vast majority of it is complete garbage, especially in long-form. I do personally use Jasper for smaller pieces of content (such as responding to HARO queries). The content that it spits out for full blog posts, however, is not at an acceptable level of quality at this time.

Once these user signals show Google that the AI-generated content is poor quality, the experimental websites will drop HARD in the search engine results pages.

Conclusion

I predict that the gurus who are running AI-generated content experiments will see an initial surge in traffic (much faster than what you would get writing content yourself or hiring writers) but that they will ultimately not be successful in the medium-to-long term.

High-quality content matters. Google may not be able to read it, but they can easily tell if the humans who end up on your site are connecting with it or not. If you are tempted to use one of these tools to spin out content for your own site, don’t.

Taking the easy way out NEVER works. If you really want to give it a try, do what the gurus are doing and don’t mess with your money site(s). Buy a new domain to run your experiment on so you don’t mess up your WiFi money income stream.

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