Hands up anyone who remembers the article spinners of 2003?

They would scrape content from sites, and spin it by using synonyms, and shuffling words around to avoid getting caught by Google's plagiarism detectors.

Then sell it to unsuspecting clients.

But that soon stopped when Google's algorithms punished them by pushing them down the SERPs rankings.

Enter ChatGPT, Jasper, WriteSonic and similar AI Tools

In examining AI content, Google has confirmed that a lot of artificially generated copy has been scraped from old, existing online content from before 2021.

So the content being generated is not current. Keep that in mind.

And Google has reminded online users that auto-generated copy has always been a no-no in their Webmaster Guidelines.

However, while Google’s Search Guru, John Mueller, has stated publicly that AI-generated content is spam to Google, this hasn't stopped a huge debate raging in the SEO community on the practical and ethical use of AI writing tools.

Or many organizations from adopting AI content and publishing it.

Using the Power of AI Writing Tools

On the upside, there are lots of ways to harness the power of AI writing tools.

Use them to generate headlines, ideas, outlines, and summaries fast. And AI can often do background research on subjects more efficiently than you or I.

Need keywords? Use AI.

Want to plan your blog and social post topics and schedule them? Use AI.

And if you are not a good writer or hot at grammar, these tools can make your writing sparkle. And check your spelling, grammar, and sentence construction.

At the moment, Google’s algorithms can't reliably detect all content generated by AI tools. However, as the content used to train AI is pre-2021, the algorithms will soon recognize similar or plagiarized AI copy and take action.

So the message is:

• use AI writing tools to generate ideas, outlines, and research

• create a first draft of any post or article

• generate headlines and taglines

• use it to improve your SEO

• always fact-check and proofread AI-generated copy

• run it through a plagiarism checker

But remember, nothing beats a human writer for adding your Brand’s voice and empathy to make your content stand out above the competition.

And to please the Google algorithm police.