The battle between marketing and finance is long fought, with marketers typically coming up on the losing end when budgets are set. Through no fault of their own, CMOs are currently experiencing a seismic shift in their go-to marketing playbook: SEO—their cheap, effective and high-performing marketing channel—is stagnating and no longer delivering results. Click-through rates (CTR) are down and the culprit is artificial intelligence (AI).
Furthermore, AI has only given red-pen happy CFOs more fuel (“can’t we just get ChatGPT to do that?”), and marketing more anxiety, as they try to prove the ROI on core expenses like SEO. But what marketers fear most about AI search, such as shifting away from traditional keyword strategies and making organic search more competitive, could actually be their solution to demonstrating real value to the company and defending against budget cuts.
The Truth About AI Search
AI will always elevate new/authentic/original content that has a high correlation to the truth. For marketers who still aren’t quite sure why their old content won’t work, consider whether their current content is adding to the overall body of knowledge. This does not have to be groundbreaking, but it does require a unique perspective or point of view that supports or challenges current knowledge—in other words, not just the same 10 tips with a new headline.
What about accurate and truthful content? Unsure of how best to use AI to create content, some marketers are copying and pasting (i.e., “ChatGPT-ing”) an SEO blog post and posting without any human editing, which begs the question: How valuable is a copy of a copy, or any AI-generated content, to an AI search engine?
With AI’s prioritization of new/authentic/original content, AI groups are doing deals with publishing companies, hoping to equip AI with these better training models. Based on the way AI learns, marketers need to stop regurgitating existing content and start producing new, useful data-driven content if they want AI to recognize their brand’s value.
Incorporating AI Into Marketing Initiatives
No doubt AI is helping companies become more efficient in various areas of business. And, for a department always on the line trying to validate its worth, incorporating AI into marketing initiatives seems like a no-brainer. But, creating new, authentic, value-adding content that is clicked, recommended, and shared across channels is a rather big lift, especially for already-stretched marketing teams.
For CMOs with big budgets, one option would be to carry out market research. Spend several thousand dollars or more to make a 10-question survey nationally representative plus more on analysis and to write the report. It’s extremely expensive but would no doubt produce epic content for marketers.
The quick and easy way would be to take target keywords and use an AI chatbot to write the article, upload it to the company’s website and share over social media. It would cost very little but it will also get companies very little because—and here’s the kicker—AI search doesn’t like LLM-produced content. It knows whether a human or a bot created the content (and increasingly so do more people). That’s not a good use of resources and could potentially damage the brand in the process.
What about a hybrid approach? Using generative AI to conduct research that produces some data and ideas that a person then creates the content around it. In theory it seems like a great solution, but it won’t be as successful because generative AI is designed to provide a summary as a response and marketers would be producing content based on a summary—not the raw data points that indicate original content and a gain in information.
Artios’s Data-Driven AI SEO Solution Delivers Distinctly Valuable Content
To stand out from the competition and drive brand awareness, marketers need to create meaningful and original SEO content that’s data-driven and written for humans, by humans. Artios’s organic approach to SEO combines the power of AI and data science to create valuable content that delivers in two ways: producing authentic content AI and traditional search engines are looking for to satisfy their fact-checking models, and generating favorable content that has multichannel appeal beyond search.
If you’re reading this, it’s because you already realize your SEO strategy isn’t working like it used to. Artios AI SEO can help you create valuable content for your target audience—not the search engines. Discover how data science can replicate market research results. Contact Artios today.