How to Use AI in SEO (Without Creating Worthless Content)

How to Use AI in SEO (Without Creating Worthless Content)

The talk around AI in SEO is deafening. It's a constant barrage of “gurus” promising you can fire your marketing team, automate everything, and rank #1 by tomorrow morning. All you need is their secret prompt formula.

It's nonsense.

As someone who lives and breathes this stuff, I see business owners getting sold a fantasy. They're pouring money into shiny new tools, expecting magic, and getting generic content. Content that does more harm than good.

So, let's cut the rubbish. AI is changing SEO, no doubt. But not in the way the hype merchants claim, it’s not a magic button. It’s a tool. And like any powerful tool, you can either use it to build something remarkable or to make a complete mess. Most people are making a mess.

This is the real-world guide to using it properly.

AI is a Lever, Not a Replacement

Think of it this way. A calculator can do complex maths in a split second. But it can't make you a mathematician. It doesn't understand the why. It has no strategic insight. It doesn't know which problem to solve in the first place.

That’s exactly what AI is for SEO.

It's a lever that allows a genuine expert to do their job faster, more efficiently, and at a greater scale. It can process data, spot patterns, and handle grunt work that used to take days.

But it has no taste. No original thought. No genuine experience. It can't feel a customer's pain point. It can't create a brand voice. It can't tell a compelling story from years of trial and error.

Your business's unique perspective and hard-won experience are your moat. AI can’t replicate that. Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to sell you something. When you outsource your thinking to a machine, you become a commodity.

The Good: Where AI is Genuinely Useful in SEO (If You Have a Brain)

Don't get me wrong, it's not all doom and gloom. Used intelligently, AI is a game-changer for the tedious parts of SEO. It frees you up to focus on the high-level strategy that moves the needle.

Supercharging Keyword Research & Content Strategy

This is the biggest legitimate win. Traditional keyword research is a slog. You pull a list of terms, eyeball the volume, and take a guess.

AI blows that out of the water.

Instead of just giving you a list of keywords, it can help you build entire topic clusters based on semantic relationships. You can feed it a core concept, like “small business accounting,” and it can instantly generate questions, subtopics, and related concepts you need to cover to establish topical authority. Think:

• “Common accounting mistakes for startups”
• “Choosing between a sole trader and a limited company”
• “VAT registration thresholds UK”
• “Best accounting software for freelancers”

It sees the forest, not just the trees. This is how you build content that answers every conceivable user question, precisely what Google wants. It's the difference between writing one article about “coffee” and creating a comprehensive resource covering everything from bean origins to brewing methods.

Untangling Technical SEO Knots

Technical SEO can be a minefield of code and jargon. AI is brilliant at simplifying it.

• Schema Markup: Need to write JSON-LD schema for a product, an event, or an FAQ page? Describing it to an AI in plain English is infinitely faster than learning the syntax from scratch. It gets you 95% of the way there in seconds.
• Regex for Search Console: Want to filter your Google Search Console data with a complex regular expression? Just describe what you want to include or exclude. “Show me all queries that are questions and contain the word ‘brand'.” It will spit out the code.
• Log File Analysis: Got a massive server log file and need to spot patterns in how Googlebot is crawling your site? AI can analyse it and summarise findings in plain English.

It's not doing the strategic thinking. You still need to know what to ask for. But it executes the tedious tasks flawlessly.

Analysing SERPs at Scale

Want to know why your competitor is outranking you for a key term? You could spend hours manually dissecting their page, headings, and internal links.

Or, you could get an AI to do it in 30 seconds.

You can ask it to analyse the top 10 results for a search query and identify common patterns.

• What's the average word count?
• What questions are consistently answered?
• What is the dominant search intent (informational, commercial)?
• What formats are being used (listicles, how-to guides, videos)?

This isn't about copying. It's about understanding the game's rules for that specific query to create something demonstrably better.

Assisting, Not Writing, High-Value Content

Here’s the most controversial part: where my biggest pet peeve lies. AI should never be the final author of your content. Full stop.

But can it be a helpful assistant? Absolutely.

Here’s how an expert uses it:

1. Outline Generation: You give it a title and a target audience. It creates a logical structure. You then tear it apart, rearrange it, and inject your unique insights.
2. Research Summary: You can link it to reports or studies and ask for a summary of the key findings. A 2023 study by the Content Marketing Institute found that 85% of B2B marketers credit content for their success—an AI can pull that stat and its source in seconds.
3. The “Shitty First Draft”: It can take your detailed outline and flesh it out. This draft will be bland, generic, and full of waffle. But it overcomes the “blank page” problem. It gives you clay to mould.

I once worked with a client selling high-end commercial espresso machines. Their first attempt at an “AI article” was a disaster. It was a soulless list of specifications you could find anywhere. We scrapped it. Instead, we used AI to research the pain points of cafe owners (e.g., maintenance downtime, inconsistent shots) and then wrote an article full of real-world stories and experience-driven advice. The AI provided the skeleton; a human provided the soul. That's the difference.

The Bad: Where Most People Go Wrong with AI

For every clever use of AI, there are a dozen examples of people getting it catastrophically wrong. The siren song of “free and easy content” is strong, but leads directly onto the rocks.

The “Generate and Publish” Trap: A Recipe for Digital Oblivion

This is the number one mistake. Someone gets access to ChatGPT, types in “write me a blog post about digital marketing,” copies the output, and slaps it on their website.

This is content for the sake of content. It has no strategy, no unique viewpoint, and no value. It's just adding to the digital landfill.

Google's mission, especially with its Helpful Content Updates, is to eradicate low-effort rubbish from its results. These sites create a terrible user experience, and Google knows it. Churning out AI-generated articles is a race to the bottom, and it's a race you will lose. You're not building an asset; you're building a liability that Google will eventually bury.

Forgetting the Human Touch (And Google's E-E-A-T)

Google's quality guidelines are built around a concept called E-E-A-T:

• Experience: Have you done the thing you're writing about?
• Expertise: Do you have deep knowledge in this area?
• Authoritativeness: Are you a recognised source on this topic?
• Trust: Is your information accurate and reliable?

AI has none of these things. It has never run a business, fixed a leaky tap, or comforted a crying child. It synthesises text based on patterns in the data it was trained on. It cannot provide a first-hand account or a genuine, hard-won opinion.

If your content lacks your unique experience and expertise, it fails the E-E-A-T test. It's just another generic article that looks and sounds like a million others. Why would Google show it to anyone?

Trusting the Output Blindly

AI lies.

Not maliciously, but it “hallucinates.” It confidently states incorrect facts, makes up sources, and generates code that doesn't work. Because it's a language model, not a knowledge base, its priority is to produce plausible-sounding sentences, not to be factually correct.

A 2023 study from Vectara found that LLMs have a hallucination rate of 3-5%, and that's likely a conservative estimate. Publishing AI output without rigorous human fact-checking and editing is professional malpractice. It will destroy your credibility.

A Practical Framework: The ‘Expert + AI' Workflow

So, how do you use it without falling into these traps? You need a system that puts your human expertise firmly in the driver's seat.

Step 1: Strategy First, Tool Second

You need a human-led strategy before considering opening an AI tool.

• Who is my customer?
• What are their deepest pain points?
• What unique perspective or experience do I bring to this topic?
• What do I want this piece of content to achieve for the business?

The AI cannot answer these questions. This is your job as the business owner or strategist.

Step 2: The Human-Led Brief

Once you have your strategy, you create a detailed brief. This is not just a title. It's a document that includes:

• The target audience and their level of knowledge.
• The core message and key takeaways.
• A list of specific questions to answer.
• Your unique angle or opinion.
• Crucial internal and external links to include.
• A clear call to action.

Step 3: AI as the World's Fastest (and Dumbest) Intern

Now, you can bring in the AI. You give it your detailed brief and ask it to produce a first draft. You treat it like a junior assistant. You expect it to do the heavy lifting of structuring and initial writing, but you don't expect it to be perfect. You know, its job is to give you raw material.

Step 4: The Expert Edit & Polish

This is where 80% of the value is created. You take the AI's bland first draft and inject your humanity into it.

• You rewrite sentences to match your brand's voice.
• You add personal anecdotes and real-world examples (the E-E-A-T).
• You fact-check every single claim.
• You challenge its points, adding nuance and contrary opinions.
• You ensure it flows logically and tells a compelling story.

The final product should be unrecognisable from the initial AI output. It has your voice, your experience, and your strategy. The AI was just the tool that helped you get there faster.

What About Google's Stance? Will You Get Penalised?

This is the question on everyone's mind. The answer is simple and has been repeatedly stated by Google.

Google does not care how content is produced. It cares about its quality.

Their official guidance is that content created primarily for search engines, with little value for humans, is spam. It doesn't matter if a human, an AI, or a team of monkeys with typewriters wrote it.

Conversely, high-quality, helpful content is rewarded, regardless of whether AI assisted in its creation. If you use the ‘Expert + AI' framework, where the AI is an assistant and the final product is shaped by human expertise to be genuinely helpful, you are perfectly aligned with Google's guidelines.

If you use the “generate and publish” method, you're creating spam. And you will eventually get hit.

My Take on the Future: AI Overviews and What Comes Next

Google is already rolling out its “AI Overviews” at the top of the search results. These AI-generated summaries aim to answer a user's query directly, without clicking on a link.

Many SEOs are panicking about this. They see it as the death of website traffic.

I see it differently.

This change simply raises the stakes. It means that to earn a click, your content has to be extraordinarily valuable. It can't just provide a simple answer that the AI can summarise. It needs to offer something more:

• Deep, unique insights.
• Compelling case studies.
• A strong, trustworthy brand voice.
• Data-driven analysis that can't be easily synthesised.

The generic “what is X” content will die. AI Overviews will absorb it. However, content that provides expertise, builds a relationship with the reader, and offers a unique point of view will become more valuable than ever.

The Bottom Line

AI is not the future of SEO. It's a powerful part of its present.

But it's a tool, not a strategy. It's a force multiplier for experts, not a shortcut for amateurs.

Stop chasing the hype. Stop looking for a magic button. The fundamentals of good marketing haven't changed. Know your customer. Solve their problems. Communicate your value clearly and authentically.

Use AI to handle the grunt work so you can spend more time on the human elements that truly matter. That's how you win in the new era of search.

We spend a lot of time thinking about how to build brands that stand out in a noisy world. If you want this direct, no-fluff thinking applied to your business, look at our digital marketing services. If you're ready to talk specifics, you can request a quote here.

AI in SEO: Frequently Asked Questions