How Horoscope.com Uses 10,000 AI Articles to Rank in Google

4 key takeaways from this blog post:

• Generative AI can help companies create thousands of articles effectively.
• AI-generated content is indexed and ranks in Google and can perform well in search results.
• Google does not exclude or punish content for being created with generative AI. 
• Optimizing AI-generated content can mean the difference between “ok” performance and “great”.

In an article, published by Digiday, the president of media at Ingenio, Josh Jaffe, explains how the company has used a generative AI to create thousands of posts. Ingenio, which runs sites like Horoscope.com and Astrology.com, started this practice  in 2021 by integrating GPT-3 into their content management system. 

According to Josh Jaffe, about 90% of each new article is generated by AI.

The use of AI has enabled Ingenio to branch out and launch a completely new site focusing on dream interpretations, which has more than 700 articles written almost entirely by AI.

Ingenio also published 10,000 articles on their existing site SunSigns.com to breathe new life into the website, and strengthened their main sites with about 1,000 articles – all created with the use of AI.

"We wouldn’t have been able to launch into an adjacent topic like dream interpretations without this tool. We wouldn’t have been able to write up 10,000 celebrity profiles without generative AI," Josh Jaffe said to Digiday.com.

All the AI generated content pieces are read by the staff and edited when needed to ensure a responsible process and that the article is accurate.

Generative AI delivers effective content creation

Creating thousands of articles with AI has reportedly cut the cost of each content piece down to a fraction of the cost of an article written traditionally. 

In fact, creating content with the help of AI has made the process extremely effective, according to Ingenio.

"We can publish faster than ever before. We can publish [for] less expensive than ever before. We can publish, in some cases, close to the same quality as ever before. We can publish 1,000 articles for the cost of what one article used to cost to produce," Josh Jaffer said.

This is all well and good; who doesn’t love fast, cheap content of at least adequate quality? Sure, thousands of articles of excellent quality would be better, but the language models are getting better quickly, so high-quality content should be right around the corner. 

AI-generated content ranks in Google

The real question, however, is how the articles are performing. 

Thousands of content pieces are only great if people can find them and engage with them. 

So, I’ve put on my trenchcoat and fedora to investigate the performance of some of the AI-generated articles from Ingenio.

As an example, I found an article about singer/songwriter Alicia Keys, who turned 42 in January of 2023. Ingenio posted an article titled “Alicia Keys Turns 42: What Her Astrological Profile Reveals About Her Future” on one of their leading websites, Horoscope.com.

Josh Jaffe from Ingenio said in the Digiday article, that the AI-generated articles were posted without a byline or listed as “by Horoscope.com”. 

The mentioned article about Alicia Keys’ birthday has “by Horoscope.com” as byline and a quick analysis from sapling.ai flags it as “100% fake”, meaning AI-generated.

So far so good.

Next, I did a search on the article URL in ahrefs.com to get an idea of how it performs. You can see the results below:

This shows that Google indexes the article and it ranks for four keywords. 

The most important keyword is “alicia keys zodiac sign”, for which it ranks as number 10. Not great but definitely approved as it is on the first page of the page results.

It even has rank one for the second keyword “alicia keys sign”, not bad at all.

Search results can be quite individual, so to satisfy my own curiosity, I did a Google search for the primary keyword and sure enough, the article was shown on the first page. 

This is not particularly surprising since I have visited the site and specific article before, but still, it underlines the fact that Google happily includes content clearly generated using an AI in their results. 

What does the performance say about AI-generated content?

For me, it is first and foremost important to notice the basic fact, that AI-generated content is indexed and ranks in Google. There would be no point in using generative AI to create content if this wasn’t the case.

Also, Horoscope.com has high authority on Google when it comes to all things related to horoscopes and astrology. This means new content, AI-generated included, is bound to rank better at Horoscope.com than sites with less authority.

Churning out content at scale using AI, such as Horoscope.com has done, means they can leverage their authority to boost their rankings and traffic.

Next, let's take a look at the generated article's quality. Even if it hadn’t been flagged as AI-generated, I don’t think I would have had any doubts about its origin. As a content writer myself, the article represents what I have come to recognize as the result of somewhat poor work with AI: Superficial and repetitive language.

I’m not pointing fingers at Horoscope.com or Ingenio in general, I’m just saying that it’s a minimum-effort article, which it’s supposed to be, and the fact that it still performs ok in search is great.

In a low-competition environment, AI-generated content may work well enough, but just imagine what would happen if you spent say, 10 minutes optimizing the article for SEO. 

Using generative AI to create content and then perfect it with your own skills and experience is a great way to get the most out of your time and get great results – and when leveraging AI SEO tools, such as SEO.ai, optimizing content has never been easier.