Don’t laugh. It is a legitimate concern. The use of AI to generate content may literally make it impossible to be seen in the not-too-distant future.
Allow me to explain…
ChatGPT has around 100 MILLION users.
(that’s about one out of every 80 people on the planet)
And ChatGPT is not the only one of its kind. There are several others too, some of which profess to be better than ChatGPT.
The BIG question is this:
How does this affect YOU?
Well…
It depends.
On the one hand, not all of those 100 million users actually use ChatGPT to create content. Some use it for content ideas, some use it for marketing research, others use it for business research and drawing up business plans. Many just signed up out of curiosity, not planning to use it at all.
However…
There are also many millions of “power users” who use the AI’s language model to generate content at an incredible pace.
They use it to create content for whole websites at a time, to write ebooks, to write video scripts, marketing emails, social media posts, and more.
If you are not a ChatGPT (or other AI) user, consider this:
1. We already have around 1.9 BILLION websites. That’s one website for every 4 people.
2. You can literally create the content for a new web page or blog post in a matter of seconds. In fact, many “power users” ask ChatGPT to come up with a list of say, 50 or 100 topics, and then ask it to write an article for each of those.
(you can even specify the approximate number of words to use)
Within minutes they have the content for a complete website with 100 pages. Or two blog posts per week for the next year.
If the user uses the right prompts, it is possible to create articles that are optimized for search engines, complete with html subheadings and solid structures.
Add to that the fact that many websites now offer text-to-image conversions, and the webmaster can now create free, copyright-free images for any web page in seconds.
And add to that the availability of several AI tools that can even create videos from a single topic…
And suddenly the threat of an over-crowded internet becomes very real.
If you have just one million ChatGPT users (1%) cranking out a thousand pages per week, that amounts to a million new websites per week – and not small ones either, so they will probably rank above many other competing websites.
Add to that another (guesstimated) 20 million who add another 100 pages of content each per week…
(blog posts, articles, press releases, etc.)
And you have 3,000,000,000 new pages of content on the internet EVERY WEEK.
That’s more than one page per adult internet user (in the whole world) every fortnight (two weeks).
However…
There is one silver lining to all of this:
Most ChatGPT users are not professional “prompt engineers”. That means that most of them will try to get to the right topics and factual content, but will – for now – not go far enough to generate articles that are unique.
(ChatGPT will – and yes, we asked it – generate a similar article/essay/blog post/ebook if it is asked to write about the same topic in the future.)
That means that there will be A LOT of duplicate content out there.
Google wants to offer the best possible user experience, so when it sees say, ten of the same article, it will show one of them in the search results, and hide the rest.
Given the high number of people using ChatGPT and similar platforms, the chances of many people asking for content on the same topic are quite high.
As such, the effect – in terms of search engines – will not be all that bad for some time to come.
Social media, however, could be a different matter.
Because of the availability of a range of AI tools, people with zero knowledge or experience of any specific industry can now use ChatGPT to create boatloads of (factually correct) posts for Facebook and Linkedin to “showcase their expertise”.
Heck, they can even use ChatGPT to craft their response to any email inquiry.
So what can YOU do to not drown in the sea of AI generated content?
Work on the things that the new “AI-generated experts” don’t know…
Work on your branding. Including the voice and tone best suited to your audience, and be consistent.
Work on your positioning.
Work on reaching the right prospects and not the masses.
And use your location, combined with your positioning, to attract potential clients and customers.
And by all means, consider using AI-generated content – but if you use it on your website or blog, do some re-writing to ensure it is unique. Otherwise it will just be buried with the other duplicate content.
On Google, you may have to work harder – and optimize for more obscure search terms. But you will still be able to be found, even if by fewer prospects. If you do it right, you will reach market segments with higher conversion rates.
On social, amidst all of the “noise”, just keep working on building your brand marketing. Eventually people will figure out which brands are real, and start ignoring the AI-generated ones.