Brain Dump by Jason Bloomberg
AI has impacted search engine optimization (SEO) for years, as Google, Bing, and other search engines have long leveraged AI in their search algorithms to understand user intent and to display relevant results.
Today’s SEO practitioners are also using AI to uncover relevant keywords that will optimize the search results for the content they produce.
Combine this AI-driven keyword strategy with generative AI’s ability to create passable marketing content, and it would seem that an all-AI strategy for generating and optimizing such content would be a straightforward proposition.
Not so fast. What SEO practitioners – and in fact, marketers generally – have failed to consider is the problem of model collapse.
As I explained in a 2023 article, model collapse occurs when AI models train on AI-generated content. It’s a process where small errors or biases in generated data compound with each cycle, eventually steering the model away from generating inferences based on the original distribution of data.
Given ChatGPT and other LLMs leverage the public web for model training, model collapse is a serious concern. After all, marketers aren’t the only people publishing AI-generated content to the web.
At the time I wrote that article, the state of the art for avoiding model collapse was careful content curation that avoided training LLMs with AI-generated content, either by avoiding public data sets like the web, or at the least, restricting training data to content generated before genAI came on the scene in 2022.
Today, however, AI is getting better at differentiating AI-generated from human-generated content – even when the humans prompting the AI are actively seeking to fool such algorithms.
The writing is on the wall: it’s only a matter of time until search results – either via a search engine or via search queries used as genAI prompts – actively avoid AI-generated content to avoid collapsing the underlying LLMs.
The impact on SEO will be dramatic: play around with keywords all you like, but it won’t be long until the most important rule of SEO is to avoid all AI-generated content.
AI-generated content will continue to be important, of course, but human-generated content that is entirely free from the touch of AI will become the SEO gold standard.
Copyright © Intellyx BV. No AI was used to write this article – and now you know why this is so important.
