Did you know AI vs. Human Content: Study Finds Minimal Ranking Differences on Google

 

Semrush analyzed 20,000 articles and surveyed more than 700 marketers to know if AI generated content ranks on Google or not. The results of the analysis showed that AI generated can get ranked on Google and generally performs a little better than human created content. The analysis showed that out of top ten ranked articles on Google, 57% of them were AI generated while 58% of them were human created. Human content did 2.1% better than AI content when it came to rankings in the top positions. In the top 3 positions, human content did 6.2% better and 4.6% better in the top five positions. In the top ten rankings, there was only a difference of 1% between human created and AI generated content.  

Users were also surveyed so they can share their experiences when it comes to their page rankings on Google search. 31% said that their rankings are the same for human and AI generated content, while 27% were not sure about it. 23% said that their AI generated content performs better than human written content while 10% said it performs much better on search engine rankings. Only 9% of the respondents said that their AI content performs worse than human written content. 30% said that they found no noticeable change in their organic traffic after publishing AI content, while 39% saw an increase in their organic traffic. Only 4.8% said that they experienced a traffic decrease after publishing AI content.

68% said that AI helps them create content faster which helps them boost SEO and content ROI and 57% said it helps them save time so they can use it somewhere else. AI content also helps them save money on writing and editing (48%) as well as helps generate more engagements with the content (34%). This all means that AI can be used for content generation as long as it is high-quality and that's what makes it rank among human written content. 39% of the respondents said that they combine human written and AI generated content for their website while 34% write the content themselves and only use AI for assistance. 5% only use AI generated content while 18% still don't use AI at all. 

When respondents were asked how they incorporate AI into content creation, 62% said they use it for their topic research and idea generation, 51% each use it for editing and rewriting, optimizing content for SEO and generating content outlines. Long form articles and blog posts (70%), meta descriptions (55%) and product descriptions (42%). Marketers are using AI to make their content more engaging, interesting and readable to users by using human editors to refine AI generated content (69%), humanising the AI generated content (60%) and only using AI to create the initial draft and then adding more content (48%).

Upon asking marketers how they make their content more original and expertise driven, they answered by conducting original research (55%), adding useful statistics to content (53%) and sharing personal experiences in the content (49%).