This AI chatbot is pretty good at crafting attention-grabbing titles, except for the fact they grab your attention for the wrong reason.
In case you weren’t aware, ChatGPT likes to stress the ultimacy of its guides by titling them as such: “The Ultimate Guide to Understanding Why ChatGPT Writes Titles With ‘Ultimate Guide’ in Them”.
If ChatGPT carries on like this, essentially using the main headline to advertise their involvement in the creation of written content for all to see, I suspect the need for AI content detectors will dissipate.
Let’s lift the hood on the causes of this commonly used ChatGPT title.
The comprehensive nature of ChatGPT
Even when the chatbot isn’t pumping out guides for users to publish on their blogs and websites etc., it still has a tendency to use words similar to ‘ultimate’ such as comprehensive, extensive and complete.
Indeed, if you’re using ChatGPT for learning purposes and ask it to explain a mildly complex concept, you can expect an introduction that contains bold phrases like “comprehensive exploration” and “in-depth discussion”.
Words like ‘comprehensive’ and ‘comprehensively’ are so ingrained in ChatGPT’s everyday vocabulary that they are officially among the tool’s most used adjectives and adverbs respectively.
The strange thing is, it’s rarely the case that ChatGPT actually follows through on its promise to provide comprehensive coverage (more on that later).
Playing the SEO game
Whenever ChatGPT writes an article or a guide, it always tries to make them SEO-friendly by copying certain elements from existing high-ranking content.
In other words, the chatbot has recognized a correlation between titles with ‘ultimate guide’ and how high the content ranks.
I can confirm from personal experience that there was a lot of ultimate guides on the web way before ChatGPT was a thing. And I will hold my hands up to the fact that I gravitated towards those titles because I trust sites that can cover a subject from A to Z.
Most people seem to think the same way, otherwise Google wouldn’t give content with these titles top positions in the search results. However, your ChatGPT-written guides are unlikely to be indexed let alone rank, because the text in the main body is far from ultimate.
Expectation vs. reality
Anyone who has read a high-ranking ultimate guide will tell you that the word count enters deep into the 1000s and the amount of sections often warrants a table of contents—it lives up to its ‘ultimate’ label.
Contrast this with ChatGPT’s ultimate guides, which barely hit the 500-word threshold whether you’re using the free version or ChatGPT Plus. You can see how this disconnect between title and content would annoy readers and search engines alike.
So prepare yourself for a double blow if you use this particular superlative in your AI-written guides: everyone knows it was spat out by a chatbot, and Google will punish you for not matching the search intent.
Summary
ChatGPT loves to present itself as an authority on every subject by using descriptions such as comprehensive, exhaustive and extensive, even though the quality of its responses doesn’t meet these standards.
The disconnect is evident in the way it writes titles for guides. ChatGPT recognizes that powerful adjectives like ‘ultimate’ are common in the titles of authoritative content but goes on to produce text that is not even remotely comprehensive.
Think twice before using the common ChatGPT title ‘ultimate guide’ or you may face reputational harm and pushback from search engines. Use ‘quick guide’ instead if this more accurately describes the scope of the content!