Much to the annoyance of human writers, content written by AI can rank high and bring in lots of traffic from the SERPs.
However, it’s very hit and miss. You find yourself having to publish hundreds of AI articles to get that diamond in the rough.
Much of it comes down to keyword research of course, but Google also puts great emphasis on the quality of the presentation and the originality of the text.
Having processed millions, maybe even billions, of AI-generated articles, Google knows all the primary hallmarks of content spat out by the likes of ChatGPT, and so do I.
Run your content past this checklist to give it the best chance of ranking. Or don’t, and risk your website getting flagged as spammy AI and not even making it past the indexing stage.
Don’t use hyphenated words in the intro
I know this sounds weirdly specific, but AI is fixated with putting hyphenated words in the first or second sentence of an article.
Be ready to eliminate commonly used compound adjectives such as ‘ever-evolving’ and ‘ever-changing’. For example, “The ever-changing world of SEO presents many challenges”.
ChatGPT in particular is guilty of this strange quirk. We reasoned that it sets the scene in this dramatic manner to draw in the reader, which is understandable from a reader engagement perspective, but Google views it as lazy cookie-cutter writing.
Don’t use misleading titles
If you want to de-rank your content in record time and get it kicked out of the index altogether, just make false statements about the content in the title.
Obviously, nobody in their right mind would do that. So why am I telling you this?
I’m telling you this because AI-generated articles often do have misleading titles—not so much explicit lies as poorly chosen adjectives when describing the length or scope of the content.
We all know that AI articles average a word count of around 500 words, so think twice before publishing content with exaggerated titles like “The Ultimate Guide to SEO” or “A Comprehensive Guide to SEO” unless said content has the depth to back up those claims.
Don’t use AI’s favorite words more than once
Using common AI words in your content won’t hurt its chances of ranking, but using them multiple times throughout will definitely attract unwanted attention from Google.
Indeed, there are certain words that AI is addicted to, and the pattern is so clear that search engines can determine with high accuracy whether a piece of content is human written or pure automated junk.
Take ’embrace’ as an example. When an AI-written article uses that word, for some reason it will appear more than once. Therefore, you need to break this pattern in your own AI articles by checking that ’embrace’ only ever appears once.
Don’t use AI’s favorite phrases
While you should be safe with a one-time usage policy for AI’s favorite words, don’t use any of AI’s favorite phrases, period.
Because a phrase consists of multiple words in a particular order, a single phrase is a recognisable pattern in and of itself. It’s like openly tagging your content as AI-generated and thus alerting Google that it isn’t of original quality.
Many of the phrases that identify AI are quite cringey anyway, so it’s worth removing or revising them on that basis alone, such as “Embark on a journey” and “A rich tapestry of X, Y and Z“.
Don’t use AI images
There are two main reasons why AI images are bad for SEO and therefore very damaging to your ranking potential.
Firstly, you can reasonably deduce that articles featuring AI images likely have AI-generated text and vice versa. After all, why would you take a shortcut for one type of content but not the other?
Using AI imagery in your AI articles will compound the risk of readers becoming suspicious of the content’s origin—if they bounce and never return, this will negatively impact your ranking.
Secondly, it indicates a lack of authority in your field. If you run a travel site with AI images, this implies you’ve never been to the places you are writing about. And that’s real cause for concern in Google’s eyes.
Conclusion
You can improve the success rate of AI content in the rankings by checking for any problematic characteristics that AI is known to have, namely the overuse of certain words and phrases, misleading titles, and non-photographic images.
By making an effort to distinguish your content from the millions of other AI-generated articles on the web, search engines are more likely to trust the quality of your work and rank it.