In this 2024‑05‑02 live webinar, Wix’s Crystal hosts SEO specialist Morty Oberstein and Search Engine Journal editor Ben Steele for a multi‑part session on AI‑driven content creation. The program opens with introductions, then presents results from a pre‑webinar survey of over 2,300 respondents about AI adoption: 88 % use AI for less than 10 % of site content, ~3 % generate more than half of their content with AI, and about 10 % fall in the 20‑50 % range. The panel discusses common AI use cases—blog posts, product descriptions, meta tags, and title tags—highlighting a surprising low adoption for product‑description generation. They explore how long users have been employing AI, noting a small but notable segment (≈6 %) with over a year of experience, some even three‑year veterans. The core of the webinar is a live audit of a submitted site (Box Media). Ben Steele critiques the site’s AI‑generated blog content, arguing that generative AI often fails to be truly helpful: it cannot understand the audience, lacks empathy, and struggles to deliver on “how‑to” expectations. He introduces the “generative AI paradox” – effective AI use requires deep subject‑matter expertise, which diminishes the value of AI‑generated content. Steele points out strategic gaps (poor title relevance, missing audience focus, insufficient post volume, and misuse of “how” in headings). He recommends treating AI as a efficiency tool for specific tasks (e.g., meta‑description drafting) rather than a content‑strategy driver. The discussion concludes with practical advice for early adopters, emphasizing incremental AI use, regular publishing cadence, and leveraging Wix SEO tools while maintaining human‑led strategy. Overall, the webinar blends data‑driven insights, critical analysis of AI‑generated content, and actionable SEO recommendations for Wix users.
Chapters
And we are so grateful to be joined today for our live audit by. So there's myself, I'm Crystal. And then there's also. Let's just get into our introduction section. There's Morty Overstein, who you. If you are a longtime WIX a webinar person, you will have seen Morty
on long time listener, first time caller on our webinars.
And you will also have seen heard him on the podcast. He's also at our events. He's my, my, my SEO partner in crime. And you can read his, his articles on the WIX SEO hub. So he's Morty Oberstein. Say hello, Morty.
Hi, that's me. I do SEO crimes, apparently.
No, no, no.
SEO crimes.
No, no, it's all fine. So anyway, so also we're joined today by the fantastic managing editor over at Search Engine Journal, fantastic SEO publication Partners. And we have Ben Steele, who also known as Blue Steel, who's joining us today for this live audit. Thank you so much, Ben, for joining us today.
Well, thank you guys.
It's always a pleasure to have to have the team from SCJ here. We had a lot of fun on our last SEO audit. So we're pleased to have you for this one.
Oh, I am excited.
Awesome. So we're gonna get just a couple of FAQs. We have people who are joining now. Some people might join a little bit later if anybody joins later. Yes, this is being recorded. Yes, please tell them yes, it's being recorded. And not only that, but we will send you a YouTube link for the video that you can watch later. So don't worry if you're, if things are moving a little bit fast, that's okay. We will be, we will be recording this. You can check it out later at your own pace. Stop, pause, see what you see, what's going on, look things up, whatever you need to do. And you can ask questions in the Q and A panel. So you've been using the chat, but there's a Q and A panel as well. We have people who are answering the questions as you ask them just there. And also you can follow along with Future webinars@wix.com SEO learn webinars. And yes, we will be going through specific websites and also you can follow along with lots of other things at the Wix SEO Learning Hub at Wix SEO, sorry, wix.comseoseo forward/learn. And also Morty always remembers this and I sometimes forget, but if you sign up to the SEO newsletter, you will get all of the information delivered to you. Our next newsletter is coming out this week, so make sure that you check out, check that out and you will be able to get lots of information about our upcoming webinars. And so we've got our introductions, we've done that and we have, we're going to go over some overall trends. We're going to talk about using AI for blog posts and we're going to talk about using AI for other content. We're going to talk about some resources and then we're going to get to the Q and A. So trends in aiu. So we had, we had lots and lots of folks respond to the content or to the thing. As we signed up for the webinar, you got a couple of questions and we had over 2,000 folks, 2,300 people respond to those questions and we got a few interesting insights from those questions. So first of all, we asked how many people are using AI for content generation and to what degree? So if you're using AI for content, how much are you using it? So there was a certain amount of people who said that they were using it for about less than 10% and that was 88% of folks for, said that they were using AI for less than 10% of their website, which I think is really interesting. We also found that about just over 3% were using AI to to create over half their content. And then we also found that there was about 10, 10ish percent people who were using AI to to create about 20 to 50% of their content. And this is something I find really interesting because all of the, the information that we're seeing is that everybody's using AI all the time. Morty Ben, were you surprised to see, to see these figures coming through?
I was surprised for sure. Pleasantly so to be honest, I agreed.
I concur and I think that it's, it's interesting. So that's something to tell you where we, where we are with, with things like that as well. Also I would say that it's worth thinking about how are you using AI on your, on your website? So again, we have lots of folks who are answering questions here and we had over 200 people who were saying they were using AI to create content generation, general content. And we also saw people using, using AI for blogs, for SEO. We saw a good number of folks who were saying that they weren't using AI AI for content yet, but they were also using it for text generation. Some people for learning for they were that were learning about AI still in the process of Learning and also some people using it for product descriptions. And I found this interesting as well. Mordy and Ben, are you finding that this is reflective of the way that you're seeing AI advertised as a way of, of incorporating into your website and things like that?
Yeah, for sure. Most of what I see when it comes to the marketing language around AI and in the SEO space, the content space specifically is folks are generally used, interested in its potential for content generation.
Yeah, and I think the content generation in terms of, in terms of general pages is slightly different from things like your AI meta descriptions and your, and your title tags and things like that. So I think that that's, that's interesting to see and I think certainly with our WIX SEO tools we've seen a lot of uptake on people using, using those sorts of text, text generation. So I think it's, it's really interesting.
I find it almost funny like that product descriptions are so low because I feel like AI is one of the product descriptions rather are one of the better places to use AI. You, it's, it's very confined. You can give it parameters. There's a thing that they have to, the AI has to describe and it can't really move beyond the bounds of this is a pair of socks. Let me describe the pair of socks to. You can't, you can't hallucinate and if it does hallucinate, you can very quickly kind of like pull it back in. So it's a little bit interesting to me that people are not using it for product descriptions.
Yeah, I agree. I think that's a great use of use of AI. I think also especially when it's stuff that is like off the shelf. So you know, when you have that sort of thing, it's useful to have AI to help you mix it up a little bit and make it make the product description more, more distinct. So I think that's interesting as well. And our last one was how long have you been using AI? Around 6% of websites that were that from the respondents today were saying that they were using websites or, sorry, they were using AI for over a year or more with some people using AI for over three years. Which is interesting because ChatGPT sort of went into the mainstream in about 2022. So we'll see. So I'm not surprised to see there's, there's people who've been using it for over a year, but the folks who've been using it for three years, they are, they're sort of a little bit ahead of ahead of the curve there. And we can see that there's lots more people coming into the mix as well. Ben, Ben, are you interested to see how many people are sort of getting into this, this content generation?
Yeah, yeah, for sure. This is, this is super interesting to me, especially the timeliness, because we've been hearing for, you know, two years or so now, like, from all sides, oh, if you're not, if you're not on the AI train now, then you're falling behind. And I, I just, I don't know if, if the, if what we're seeing here really supports that.
Yeah, I also curious the. For the one month, if you came back in, how many people, if you came back in a month from now or two months from now and ask the same question, would also be saying one month because they used it and then left it.
Right, Right. That's interesting as well. So, yeah, so it's very interesting and that just gives you an idea of where, where people are. So if you're, if you're early in your stages, don't worry because it looks as, it seems like a lot of other marketers are as well. And with that, I'm going to stop sharing and I'm going to let Ben get into a little audit of one of the sites that someone submitted. So lots of people submitted their URLs for us to have a look at and Ben's going to look at one. As we said, a lot of people are using AI for blogs and he's looking at one who's just getting started with that. That. Oh, Ben, your microphone's not on.
Ah, there we go. The format of the, the screen changed. Okay, can everyone see my screen here? Awesome. So my perspective and the perspective of SEJ is probably a little more critical on generative AI than most. And so obviously thank you everybody for submitting your sites and specifically box media, who we're going to, who I'm going to be looking at. I want to say that if I come off as very critical, I want you to know that I'm critiquing the tool, not necessarily you and your business and your business practices. You know, I'm hoping to outline some, some things that I think are some great examples of why I have the opinions I do about generative AI and how I don't necessarily think it's the best tool for, for this. So, yeah, I'm not, not here to be cruel. So I mean, first, this is a, this is a pretty blog. I like it and nice with the, the time to Read note up here. That's a really nice addition. Anyway, the first thing I'll say is, you know, four posts here on this blog, not really enough for a test. So if you are, you know, testing performance and impact, this is, this is not enough. And you would, you would need more content and you would need to post kind of more regularly. And by regular, I don't mean like more frequent, I mean at regular intervals. So looking at these titles here, I want to start getting into why I believe that generative AI is not fit for purpose for creating blog content. So generative AI is very good at pretending to understand, but the problem is it doesn't by default, it doesn't know you like you know you. It doesn't know your audience like they know themselves. And it also doesn't know where the connections are between you and your audience. It doesn't know how to be helpful. And I'm going to get into what helpful means in a little while. And then there's what I call the generative AI paradox, which is you need, in order to effectively ensure that generative AI is doing the right things and it's not making mistakes and that everything is correct, you need to know your subject matter quite well. But if you know your subject matter quite well, you can make content better than generative AI. So in my opinion, what's, you know, what's the point? So here's why, where I see kind of the demonstration of some of some of these critiques I have in the blog posts here. I'm kind of looking at these titles and I'm asking myself, who am I supposed to be as a reader? This blog is very like you, focused. It's focused on the product and your product and what it does. But it doesn't answer any questions, it doesn't address any pain points I might have as somebody in real estate. And I'm not even quite sure who I'm supposed to be in real estate looking at these. Am I a realtor, Am I a developer, Am I someone else? And so that's one of the problems I see with letting generative AI run wild with your, with your titles and your blog content. Excuse me, I need to take a sip. And so what this seems to me is to lack a little bit of content strategy. And this is why it's important when you're entering gener thinking about putting generative AI into your process is that you're using it as a tool to make very specific improvements in your efficiency and not letting it take over things like your Strategy and your own insights. It's best used to support all the stuff that you already know, not to create things. So, okay, let's talk about what I said earlier, where AI struggles with being helpful help. Being helpful requires knowledge, empathy and experience. And a lot of people in SEO will say, oh, you have to make helpful content. You have to make, you know, high quality, authoritative content. And a lot of the response is, what the heck does that mean? So I'm going to try and get into that a little bit. And we're going to start with this post right here, which is the true cost of 3D visualization. How is the price determined? Now, I want to use this as an indicator of how to think about helpful content because there's a very important word in this title. It's the word how. That is a word you have to be very, very careful with because how comes with a set of very specific expectations. I'm looking at this post and I expecting to learn exactly how we determine a price for the cost of. For the cost of this. Right? And unfortunately, the AI has not written a post that does that. It goes into all of the elements that go into this decision, but there's no actual rundown of the process of determining the price. It's basically a long way of saying it depends. And these are the things it depends on. And it's because you've used this word how that I'm expecting maybe examples, maybe for you to walk me through a process. And this is a very specific thing that an AI is not really capable of doing for you because, excuse me, because it depends on your unique knowledge of the business to write this content. So an AI can't write this post for you, you have to write this post. And then an AI can be useful once you've done that in all sorts of different ways. But it shouldn't be the one writing this post because this is unsatisfactory content to me. It's not helpful. It doesn't answer this. This how so we're going to move on to this real estate sales tips post. I wouldn't use these in post titles. These are code brackets. I'm not a technical SEO. I don't know if they would cause technical problems, but I would, I would take these out. They're a little confusing. Any. So down here we have this how problem again, right? How to determine the right price. Now, when you're doing an H2 like this, my first question is what? It's a good idea to be very specific, even though what you're talking about may be specified elsewhere. But what this section is about is it's about how you shouldn't inflate your price at first when you release your listing because you rob yourself of the opportunity to acquire buyers when the most eyes are on your on your listing. That's what this is about. It's so it's not actually about how to determine the right price. It's about don't do this very specific thing when pricing your listing. And so again, you know, you have a title that asks this question how? And then you don't answer how to do it. And that goes into what I think you need to know about helpful content. What is helpful in terms of SEO? In terms of content strategy? It's setting an expectation and then delivering on that expectation. And the thing about generative AI is it's really, really good at setting expectations. It's good at hyping you up and being like, this is awesome. This content's going to be great. But then it can't deliver. And that is a huge problem when it comes to content marketing, when it comes to organic SEO and satisfying user intent. Oops, excuse me. Okay, so we're going to move on to the next tab here.
