AI has made its way into pretty much every corner of digital marketing at this point and SEO is no exception. But there’s a real difference between using AI as a tool that makes your work better and using it as a replacement for doing the work at all. Getting that distinction wrong is where a lot of people are messing up right now.
The clearest rule of thumb is this. AI is great for analytical tasks and pretty bad for creative ones. If you’re asking it to look at data, compare things, identify patterns, or flag issues, you’re probably going to get something useful. If you’re asking it to create content that a human is supposed to read and find valuable, you’re going to get something that looks like content but doesn’t really function like it.
A good example of AI being genuinely useful is competitive site analysis. Say you want to figure out why a competitors site is outperforming yours. Go to their site, right click, view page source, copy the whole thing. Do the same on your site. Paste both into your AI tool of choice and just ask it to compare the two and tell you where yours falls short. It’s going to read the actual code on both sides and give you a pretty decent list of differences. That’s a legitimate use because it’s analytical. The AI isn’t creating anything, it’s just reading and comparing.
Things like finding 404 errors and broken links, managing XML sitemaps, those are also solid use cases. The AI can help you identify the issues even if it can’t always fix them for you. Think of it as giving you the list and then you go do the actual work of fixing things.
Where it falls apart is content. Using AI to write your blog posts, your meta descriptions, your service pages, and just putting that directly on your site is a bad idea and it’s getting worse. Google is getting better at detecting it and actively deprioritizing it. But more importantly even if it somehow slipped past the algorithm, people can tell. We’re in a moment where peoples tolerance for generic AI slop is basically zero. The content that actually gets read and shared and linked to is the stuff that feels like a real person wrote it with a real perspective and real knowledge behind it.
The same principle shows up everywhere. The Instagram accounts that blow up aren’t the ones posting AI generated quote graphics over classical paintings with trending audio. Those are everywhere and nobody cares. The ones that actually get traction are weird, specific, genuine. Hard to predict. Hard to replicate. The easier something is to produce the less value it has and that’s as true for website content as it is for anything else.
AI is a tool and a genuinely useful one in the right contexts. But people who think they can hand it their whole job and collect a paycheck are going to figure out pretty quickly that the output isn’t actually as good as doing the work yourself. Effort gets rewarded. That’s not a motivational poster thing, it’s just how the algorithm actually works.
