S3 EP37: SEO Shorts: Should I Use AI-Generated Content?

We're looking at like late August, you know, 2026 right now.

This is, I would say, been a big topic of discussion for the past few years.

It's surfaced as another even, I would say, more influential discussion topic recently because Claude announced a couple weeks ago that they've started to add a little watermark into any sort of outputted content that's coming directly from Claude.

And from there, they're going to start providing training data to audiences They say third-party partners, but we can assume that's going to be search engines, any sort of social channels, you name it, that indicate when any of this content, whether written or visual content, is actually generated largely by Claude.

Now, there are all sorts of tools that have already surfaced that are saying they can remove Claude's watermark.

Point being, though, there's a lot of concern that, oh, well, now Google's going to be able to see that my content is AI-generated.

Am I going to get penalized for it? I want to start out by being extremely clear.

Again, timestamping this August 2026.

Google has stated very explicitly that they are not against AI generated content.

What Google and the other search engines are really against is having a massive amount of low quality content that they have to sift through and try and remove from search results to create a really great customer experience.

So at a surface level, if you were using AI to create content for your website, and that is enabling you to make better content than you would be able to create as a regular human being writer, that's great.

That AI use case is still totally okay.

Most likely that's not the case, though.

So what we're going to talk about today is how to actually assess whether you should be using AI to create content for your website.

One of the scenarios that I would say, hey, give it a shot, see if it works out for you.

One of the scenarios where I'd very firmly recommend against taking a really intensive AI content creation strategy.

And we're going to talk through if you actually do decide to use AI for your content creation.

We're going to talk through the flow that we've been testing out internally for our handful of our blog articles for the into growth site that is working extremely well to use AI to do most of the heavy lifting of the writing while also still creating exceptional content that's up to our brand standards.

So the first thing I like to share is why not to use AI for content creation.

Single biggest reason that I would argue against using AI for content creation is that AI removes so much of the barrier to entry to actually publish a lot of written content.

that it becomes really easy and very tempting to just get lazy and start pushing out this AI slop left and right with minimal oversight.

Now, if you take that approach, let's say you get into a flow where every day you're pushing out one article, maybe you're pushing out 10 articles a day on your website that are almost entirely AI generated, What's going to happen in most of those scenarios is that those articles are, A, not going to be written in your brand voice.

Even if you do train Claude or your LLM of choice, it's really hard to get them to consistently convey your brand voice.

We've been doing a lot of training with our own internal Claude project.

We've gotten it to be a lot better, but it's still not there yet.

We're looking at like late August, you know, 2026 right now.

This is, I would say, been a big topic of discussion for the past few years.

It's surfaced as another even, I would say, more influential discussion topic recently because Claude announced a couple weeks ago that they've started to add a little watermark into any sort of outputted content that's coming directly from Claude.

And from there, they're going to start providing training data to audiences They say third-party partners, but we can assume that's going to be search engines, any sort of social channels, you name it, that indicate when any of this content, whether written or visual content, is actually generated largely by Claude.

Now, there are all sorts of tools that have already surfaced that are saying they can remove Claude's watermark.

Point being, though, there's a lot of concern that, oh, well, now Google's going to be able to see that my content is AI-generated.

Am I going to get penalized for it? I want to start out by being extremely clear.

Again, timestamping this August 2026.

Google has stated very explicitly that they are not against AI generated content.

What Google and the other search engines are really against is having a massive amount of low quality content that they have to sift through and try and remove from search results to create a really great customer experience.

So at a surface level, if you were using AI to create content for your website, and that is enabling you to make better content than you would be able to create as a regular human being writer, that's great.

That AI use case is still totally okay.

Most likely that's not the case, though.

So what we're going to talk about today is how to actually assess whether you should be using AI to create content for your website.

One of the scenarios that I would say, hey, give it a shot, see if it works out for you.

One of the scenarios where I'd very firmly recommend against taking a really intensive AI content creation strategy.

And we're going to talk through if you actually do decide to use AI for your content creation.

We're going to talk through the flow that we've been testing out internally for our handful of our blog articles for the into growth site that is working extremely well to use AI to do most of the heavy lifting of the writing while also still creating exceptional content that's up to our brand standards.

So the first thing I like to share is why not to use AI for content creation.

Single biggest reason that I would argue against using AI for content creation is that AI removes so much of the barrier to entry to actually publish a lot of written content.

that it becomes really easy and very tempting to just get lazy and start pushing out this AI slop left and right with minimal oversight.

Now, if you take that approach, let's say you get into a flow where every day you're pushing out one article, maybe you're pushing out 10 articles a day on your website that are almost entirely AI generated, What's going to happen in most of those scenarios is that those articles are, A, not going to be written in your brand voice.

Even if you do train Claude or your LLM of choice, it's really hard to get them to consistently convey your brand voice.

We've been doing a lot of training with our own internal Claude project.

We've gotten it to be a lot better, but it's still not there yet.