AI Content Is Short-Term Arbitrage, Not Long-Term Strategy
For a few hundred bucks, you can hit the big red “publish” button and use generative AI to write every article you’ve ever wanted to write. It’s sorely tempting.
But beyond the short-term dopamine hit of publishing a thousand articles at once, for most businesses, the negatives of AI content will very quickly outweigh the positives.
There’s a small chance of a big Google penalty
First up—there is precedent for getting a Google manual action for publishing AI content at scale.
Back in November, the founder of an AI content tool tweeted about their “SEO heist”. They exported a competitor’s sitemap, turned every URL into an article title, and used AI to publish 1,800 articles:
In some ways, this is part of the cat-and-mouse game of SEO. A website identifies a traffic opportunity, their competitors follow suit. But in the month following the tweet, the site’s traffic tanked to virtually zero: