AI isn’t the problem. Using it to churn out generic content is. Here’s how to use it properly.
I heard somebody on the radio saying that AI is getting dumber the other day. He had his reasons, but I think he was certainly wrong. AI isn’t getting dumber.
But I do sometimes wonder whether the internet it has to work with is.
Over the last few years, millions of businesses have discovered that they can open ChatGPT, type:
Write me a 1,000-word SEO blog about [insert keyword here].
…and have something reasonably polished sitting in front of them seconds later.
At first, it felt revolutionary.
And, for a while, it worked. Businesses that had barely published anything suddenly had new articles appearing every week. More pages meant more keywords, more impressions and, in plenty of cases, more traffic.
Then everybody else discovered exactly the same trick. Now we’re filling the internet with an extraordinary amount of content that isn’t necessarily wrong or even badly written.
It’s just very, very average.
And if that’s still the main way you’re using AI for SEO in 2026, I think you’re missing the much bigger opportunity.
AI Slop Didn’t Always Fail
It’s tempting to rewrite history and pretend generic AI-generated SEO content never worked.
It did.
I’ve worked with a couple of businesses over the last year that had gone heavily down this route before I became involved.
They found keywords, asked AI to create articles around them and published regularly.
Initially, visibility increased.
That encouraged them to produce even more. Then things started moving in the opposite direction.
Traffic fell. Rankings disappeared. Articles that once generated impressions stopped doing very much at all.
I wouldn’t claim AI-generated content alone caused those declines. SEO rarely gives us explanations that conveniently tidy. Google updates. Competitors improve. Search behaviour changes. AI Overviews now answer questions that previously generated website clicks.
But there was one obvious weakness running through much of the content.
There wasn’t much in it that couldn’t have been written for almost any other business in the same industry.
The words were technically unique. The information wasn’t.
And that’s an important distinction.
Unique Words Aren’t the Same as Unique Information
Ask AI:
What are the benefits of hiring a commercial decorator?
You’ll probably get professional results, time savings, better preparation, quality materials and longer-lasting finishes.
Nothing there is wrong.
But what have we actually learned?
Almost any decorator could publish exactly the same information.
More importantly, AI could generate 500 variations of that article before lunchtime.
Changing the wording doesn’t create new information.
Adding another 700 words doesn’t create expertise.
And squeezing the keyword into four H2 headings doesn’t magically make the article worth reading.
Google’s own guidance increasingly emphasises creating useful, original content rather than pumping out pages at scale that add little or nothing new.
That’s not Google saying AI content is bad.
It’s something much more sensible:
Content that adds nothing isn’t particularly useful, regardless of whether a human or a machine created it.
Some SEO Agencies Really Should Know Better
The part I find particularly entertaining is when SEO agencies themselves are still doing this.
These are genuine article ideas I’ve found on agency websites:
What to Expect from an SEO Agency
And:
8 Benefits of Hiring an SEO Agency
In 2026? Really?
From businesses selling other businesses advice on how to improve their search visibility.
Look, there’s nothing inherently wrong with either subject.
Someone probably searches for them. But if your content strategy still boils down to finding a keyword and commissioning the most predictable possible article around it, perhaps the strategy needs updating.
Before opening anything called “99 Benefits of Hiring an SEO”, I reckon most of us could have a fair stab at what’s coming.
Expertise. Saves time. Better tools. Local knowledge. More traffic. Blah, blah,blah.
There you go. I’ve already written the intro.
Seriously though. If you’re an SEO company telling clients they need expertise, authority and original content while publishing articles that could have appeared on virtually any agency website over the last 5 years, there’s a slight credibility problem.
The Problem Isn’t AI. It’s How We’re Using It
I’m not anti-AI.
Quite the opposite. I use it every day. It helped me write this blog.
What I’m saying is I think businesses that learn how to use AI properly now will have a considerable advantage over businesses that fail to grasp the full opportunity.
But that advantage isn’t going to come from producing 50 mediocre articles instead of five.
Everybody can do that now.
The interesting part starts when you combine AI with information your competitors don’t have.
Give AI Something Worth Working With
Imagine you’re a drain company.
You could ask:
Write me a blog about common causes of blocked drains.
You’ll get grease, hair, wet wipes, roots and foreign objects.
Perfectly reasonable.
Also perfectly predictable.
Now imagine you’ve just completed a job where previous contractors failed to identify the problem, your CCTV investigation led you to a hidden manhole beneath a floor, and eventually you discovered a brick had fallen into the drain.
Now we’ve got something to work with.
And no AI could possibly have knowledge about that job, or your experience of it.
But give it the engineer’s notes, a couple of photographs, a location and explanation of what happened and suddenly it becomes incredibly useful.
It can help turn one real job like that into a detailed case study, FAQs, a Google Business Profile post, social content and useful supporting material for your local service pages.
That’s how I’ve been using AI with businesses such as A1 Drain Clean up in Newcastle. It’s how I’m using it now.
The experience comes from the business.
AI just helps us get more value from it.
And that’s very different from asking a machine to pretend it has experience it can never possess.
Your Business Already Holds Better Information Than ChatGPT
Most businesses are sitting on a mountain of useful information.
They just don’t think of it as content.
Customer emails, WhatsApp conversations, reviews, quotations, Search Console data, photographs, sales calls, completed jobs and even complaints can all reveal what customers actually care about.
That’s the material I’m increasingly giving to AI.
One of my current faves is to combine Google Search Console with AI.
So instead of asking:
Give me 20 blog ideas.
Give the AI tool of your choice twelve months of Search Console data and ask it to do something like; identify searches with high impressions but poor click-through rates, unexpected terms you’re already appearing for or obvious gaps between what people search and what your existing pages answer.
Now you’re working with actual customer behaviour rather than asking AI to guess what people might want.
The same applies elsewhere.
Instead of asking it to invent FAQs, give it real customer questions. The ask it to expand on those.
Instead of telling it to write a service page from scratch, give it customer enquiries, reviews, project notes and competitor pages and ask what information appears to be missing.
AI becomes far more useful when you stop treating it as a cheap copywriter and start using it as an analyst.
AI Can Help Find Opportunities You’d Probably Miss
I’ve seen this particularly clearly with ecommerce.
While working with a boutique clothing manufacturer recently, Search Console data helped me uncover existing demand around a whole new product line.
That wasn’t an arbitrary blog topic generated by an SEO tool.
People were already searching.
Google was already connecting the website with those searches.
The opportunity was sitting there in the data.
We could then combine that information with real products, customer demand and the owner’s genuine expertise to grow out a new area for the business to expand into.
AI and a little keyword data ultimately became much more than a quick content idea. It actually helped identify a new revenue stream. And that’s the sort of thing AI is helping businesses find.
Not “10 Reasons Alternative Fashion Is Popular”. I think civilisation can limp on without that one.
A Quick Word About AI Images
The same applies to images.
AI image generators can produce genuinely brilliant things.
So please don’t use them exclusively to create another picture of four suspiciously cheerful people sitting around a laptop in a modern office, looking like they just hoofed a bag of Ketamine. What’s the point?
If you’re going to generate images, at least be creative. Create something distinctive, funny, strange, unique to you or, God forbid, something genuinely useful.
And before publishing it, actually look at it. Check the hands. Check the feet. Check the background. Count people’s fingers.
Make sure nobody has acquired a shoe for a forearm or developed a second set of teeth halfway up one cheek.
AI image generation is getting really good. That still doesn’t mean you should upload the first thing it produces.
Real Experience Is Becoming More Valuable
As generic content becomes almost free to produce, it naturally becomes less valuable.
The scarce stuff moves elsewhere.
Real experience. Original information. Useful statistics. Interesting opinions. Actual photographs. Proper case studies. Things customers really said. Things you’ve learned from doing the work.
AI can help organise, analyse and communicate all of that brilliantly.
But it can’t go out and acquire twenty years of experience for you.
It can imitate the language of experience. That’s not the same thing.
And this may become even more important as people increasingly use ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews and other AI systems to find information. If your website simply repeats something an AI already knows, why does it particularly need your page? And even if it does now, do you still think it will in a year?
A website becomes much more useful when it contributes something new.
One Question to Ask Before Creating Your Next Piece of AI Content
Before asking AI to produce your next article, page or social post, ask yourself one thing:
What am I giving AI that it couldn’t already find on the internet?
If the answer is nothing, think twice.
You may simply be asking it to remix information that’s already been remixed hundreds of times. And circling back to the top, that was the guy on the radio’s core argument. If the information AI has to research is full of AI-generated slop, then ultimately its response could ‘become dumber’.
But if you’re giving it your own data, customers, photographs, results, experience, opinions or expertise, you’ve got something far more interesting.
So Learn to Use AI Better
I don’t think the future of SEO is human versus AI.
Nor do I think handing everything over to AI is a particularly clever move right now.
The big opportunity is combining the two.
Humans bring experience, judgement, customer understanding and original information.
AI is extraordinarily good at analysing, comparing, organising and turning that information into something useful. Really quickly.
Put them together properly and you’ve got something genuinely powerful.
Within a few years, saying your business uses AI will be meaningless. Everybody will.
The competitive advantage will come from how well you use AI.
So by all means use ChatGPT to help write your next article.
I certainly will.
Just don’t start with:
Write me a 1,000-word blog about my keyword.
Begin by giving it something genuinely worth writing about.
AI has made average content incredibly cheap. But good, original content will always, always hold its own. Because it comes from the one place AI will always struggle to understand: lived human experience.
