First-hand experience with AI content from a pet website by Move Marketing tells us that:
- AI content works – meaning; the content is indexed and ranked.
- AI content is like a first draft; you must fact-check, edit, proofread, and format it before publishing.
- AI content means you get more content out of the budget without sacrificing quality.
Artificial intelligence promises high-quality content in seconds, but how good is it in reality, and how does it perform on SERP and with the audience?
AI content creation is one of those things where you see the train moving, and you have to decide to either get on board or risk being left behind.
One who chose to jump on the AI content train early is Kristian Ole Rørbye. He’s an internet entrepreneur and founder of Move Marketing, a company developing websites with more than 50 active sites at the moment. He shifted to AI content after the launch of ChatGPT, and so far, the results have been impressive, he says:
“I would almost say that the content is better than what we normally publish. Also, it is even more optimized because we have more time to go in-depth with which headers to use and what questions to answer.”
In his experience, working with AI content doesn’t mean clicking a button and then publishing the text. Still, with the correct input, editing, and formatting, AI content works well and means the company gets much more done without increasing the budget.
Early AI content missed the mark
Move Marketing, Kristian Ole Rørbyes company has between 50 and 60 websites currently active. About 70% are in Danish, .dk, while the rest are mainly in English, .com. Move Marketing develops and maintains these websites, publishes new content, and optimizes the existing pages to improve performance and rankings.
It takes a lot of time and effort, and naturally, Kristian Ole Rørbye is always interested in ways to make the process more effective, including automation. But his experience has been somewhat lackluster in the past regarding auto-generated content.
“I remember a meetup here in Chiang Mai a few years ago, just before the pandemic hit, and going in, I was very excited about the potential of AI,” he says, remembering.
A company was explaining how they used generated content for outreach and PBN. They presented some examples, and the generated output was, in Kristian ole Rørbyes eyes, quite good – all things considered – just not good enough.
“The texts were good enough for link-building articles, the type of content you don’t expect anyone to actually read, but not great for blog posts and such,” he says.
The first experiment with AI content died a slow death
There was also the fact that Google hadn’t made any clear statement about how the search behemoth would react to AI content. Would it penalize auto-generated content? Would Google even index it?
“I couldn’t believe anyone would dare to use this technology in their business. Both because of the quality, which wasn’t very good and because of Google.”
But excited about the prospect, Move Marketing launched a new site using only AI-generated content. This allowed them to experiment with the technology without risking bombing their existing websites. The content would still need to be edited and optimized like always, but the first draft would be auto-generated.
However, the generated content took too long to edit to actually work. The quality of the output simply wasn’t high enough.
“The site launched alright and gained some traction, but it wasn’t really worth our investment, and perhaps more importantly, we didn’t feel proud about the content, and so we lost the motivation to work on the project.”
Kristian Ole Rørbye's excitement about artificial intelligence and generated content had run dry.
ChatGPT made AI content viable
In late 2022, things changed dramatically and suddenly with the launch of ChatGPT.
“I was blown away. I still remember almost getting the wind knocked out of me as I realized the number of possibilities that instantly presented themselves with this technology. It was overwhelming,” he says.
The output from ChatGPT was so good the possibilities seemed endless and made it impossible to decide where to begin. It felt almost paralyzing. English, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish – ChatGPT didn’t seem to care, so Kristian Ole Rørbye and Move Marketing could leverage the technology on all their sites if they chose to.
Then he thought of that .com they had lying around with AI-generated content.
“It was so obvious. Here’s a site already with AI content we haven’t touched in a long time, so let’s build a structure of content – a lot of content – using ChatGPT and see how it goes.”
Double the impressions and clicks with AI content
Since January, they have published one or two articles every day. Starting by finding relevant keywords and getting ChatGPT to write the first draft, which is fact-checked, edited, formatted, and proofread before publishing.
Kristian Ole Rørbye doesn’t want to disclose the exact .com he has unleashed AI on, but it has to do with “pets”, he says.
“About 70% of the content on the site is informative articles, I would say, and 30% is buyer-intent content like tests, reviews, and such. So it’s a mix where we focus on creating content with information people need in combination with bottom-funnel content,” he explains.
Now the results are in for the first three months, and they are pretty impressive.
Both impressions and clicks have doubled since the experiment began in January 2023.
And data from May suggests it's not a temporary increase.
So, what is the main difference from their earlier experiment with AI content? Quality.
Great content works no matter who writes it
The early iterations of content generators delivered a text that needed a lot of work, so much so that it didn’t make sense to use the technology.
Now generative AI has reached a point where it can generate believable content. Instead of changing every paragraph, sometimes every sentence, a content editor can now build on the text and optimize it immediately.
The process at Move Marketing is very much like it has always been, except where they would normally get a copywriter to draft the article, they now get ChatGPT to do it.
AI content in 6 steps from start to publish at Move Marketing:
- Keyword research. The first thing they do is to identify around 100 keywords, each of which will be the focus of one article.
- Outline for the article. They then create an outline for an article based on the keyword defining the topics and questions the article needs to address.
- Create the first draft. This is where ChatGPT comes into play. They ask the AI to write each of the paragraphs one by one, which in their experience, creates better results than generating an entire article using ChatGPT. This provides them with a first draft, a “raw” article.
- Fact checking. The AI doesn’t know if the text is true, so the article undergoes fact-checking to ensure everything is correct.
- Visuals are added. The article is formatted, and visuals are added. Images, tables, relevant videos, or pictures from Pinterest or Instagram.
- Final editing, proofreading, and publishing. At this step, a content editor goes everything over to ensure it sounds, looks, and feels right – everything is spelled right, and so on before publishing the article.
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As you can see, ChatGPT plays a relatively small role in the process at Move Marketing as a whole, but a significant and time-saving role.
“Generating that first draft takes about five to ten minutes when we have the keywords and the outline ready. Depending on how long the article needs to be, of course,” Kristian Ole Rørbye explains.
Most content pieces are between 1,000 and 2,000 words, and those are done within 10 minutes. A copywriter would get 40-60 dollars for a 1,000-word article depending on their experience as a writer and their knowledge of the specific topic.
“Now we can generate a first draft like we would get from a copywriter in less than 10 minutes, and it costs something like 5 dollars. I haven’t done the math on this, mind you, but it’s around that figure,” he says.
Cheaper content doesn’t mean Move Marketing spends less on content creation. It just means they get more content and more time to optimize each piece.
Cheaper content, fast, allows for better content
At Move Marketing, they spend the same amount of time on keyword research and the outline as before. Proofreading, fact-checking, formatting – all of that is also the same.
“Still, the amount we save by using AI to write the first draft is huge, but really it’s more a question of what we are able to do with the budget. How much content we can produce, that’s what’s surprising,” Kristian Ole Rørbye says.
Publishing one to two pieces of content every day for three months, as they did with the “pet” website, would not have been possible without AI. At all, he says.
“To reach the same results on that website alone without ChatGPT would have cost an exorbitant amount of money.”
In-depth optimization creates professional pride
So, the AI-generated content is faster and cheaper, but what about the quality? The early experiment died slowly in part because of poor quality draining the motivation from the crew.
“AI content leaves more room for optimization in the budget. The result is that my go-to content editor is more proud of what he publishes now than he has ever been. Because the articles are simply great content, highly optimized, and create a lot of value for our audience,” Kristian Ole Rørbye says.
This is supported by the fact that the number of reactions and comments to the content has also increased. On average, someone communicates with the website daily in response to the AI-generated content.
“The audience wants more information from us. They click on more content and ask us directly more often. That makes us feel like the experts, though it really is ChatGPT who writes the articles – and responds to their comments, by the way.”
AI struggles with specifics and hands-on experiences
It is no secret that ChatGPT is at its best when writing about topics that have already been identified, defined, and described many times before. Creating new articles on the same topics it was trained on, well, that’s easy.
There are, however, situations when writing a piece of content requires a very specific and narrow kind of knowledge.
“In our experience, using ChatGPT when creating B2B content doesn't make much sense. This kind of content requires knowledge about that particular company, its product line, and perhaps especially its clients,” Kristian Ole Rørbye says.
It requires a lot of background information to produce B2B content, and you would have to feed all this information to the AI for it to create something usable. So while it is possible to use AI, at the moment it just isn’t worth it, according to Kristian Ole Rørbye.
“And you see the same kind of limitation when it comes to hands-on experiences, like product testing, reviews, and that kind of thing,” he says.
Kristian Ole Rørbye has his own blog at Kristianole.dk, where he writes about web hosting and the like. He has experimented with ChatGPT on his blog, but it doesn’t know enough about specific websites and their features.
“I often visit a website to try it out and write a review of the site and its features for my blog, but ChatGPT isn’t familiar with the specifics and it can’t assess the functionality of a website, so that kind of hands-on experience is left for us. For the time being,” he says.
Overall the current iteration of generative AI has a lot of knowledge about an insane amount of topics, but the knowledge can be somewhat superficial. When you want to go deeper, that’s where you challenge the AI and you find its limitations – that at least is the experience at Move Marketing.
Still hesitant to roll out AI content on all websites
The success of his experiment with ChatGPT on the “pet” website means that Kristian Ole Rørbye has expanded the experiment to other sites. He is eager to see if the technology can create similar results across the myriad of websites and topics Move Marketing works with.
However, he is reluctant to roll out the full use of AI content generation on all the company’s websites.
“Some websites, our oldest ones, simply represent too large an investment to risk anything right now. We have put so much time, effort, and money into these websites for over a decade that if they suddenly lost their rankings and AI was somehow to blame. I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself,” he says.
The reason for his hesitation? Google.
Right now, Google has made it clear that they don’t care who writes the content as long as it is good content that has value and information people want or need. The big question is whether Google still “feels” the same way about AI content in three months, six months, in a year or two.
Nobody can know for sure. With the fast pace of AI development and a public debate on AI filled with fear, calling for restrictions, maybe Google will change its mind – or be forced to.
“Our business relies on traffic from search, so at the end of the day, it’s actually Google who decides whether our strategy with AI content is a success. Whether it is a sound business model. So I’ll wait a few Google updates before rolling out AI content across the board.”
Kristian Ole Rørbye will continue experimenting with AI content and expand on its use where possible while keeping a keen eye on performance until he feels safe enough to start using AI content on his most valuable sites.
But then he and Move Marketing will be all in.
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