This content was created by Eric Siu. This content was uploaded by Eric Siu. This is a YouTube episode titled "5 AI-Powered SEO Trends That Will Shatter Your Google Rankings | Ep. 2609" (posted Nov 19, 2023). It is a conversational, podcast-style discussion between Eric Siu and Neil Patel about current AI+SEO trends: widespread creation of Q&A/UGC pages, programmatic SEO at scale, the rising need for QA (human or AI-assisted) to avoid site-wide traffic harm, examples of sites that lost significant organic traffic after heavy AI-generated publishing (a fashion site ~23% loss; an auto content site ~38% loss), and best practices such as using AI to assist humans for idea generation and content updates rather than full automation. Metadata: contenttype=YOUTUBE, createdtime=2023-11-19T15:00:37+00:00.
Chapters
All right, so we're going to talk about what we're seeing with AI SEO right now. So Neil, do you want to go first or you want me to go first?
The big thing that I'm seeing right now, dude, is I'm just seeing a massive creation of people doing Q&A pages on their sites. Whether it's UGC, like what LinkedIn is doing, or some people are just manually creating a lot of question and answer pages, they're all trying to go after, all right, Google and Bing are going to answer people's questions. How do we create 1,000, 5,000 pages that just have specific questions, long tail, and answers? And we're seeing a mass creation of that. And on top of that, you and I are both seeing this, but we're also seeing a lot of companies create a ton of AI-driven content. We are actually seeing more of that earlier this year. And reality's kicked in with a lot of the companies that We wanted to work with, and they were just like, "No, we can create all the content through AI," or some of the people that we were working with, like, "No, we want to use AI," and we started running A/B tests for them and showing them. And it's like, look, one is getting a lot of traffic. The AI stuff isn't getting that much traffic, and people are starting to shift their strategies to becoming more like what they used to, but not exactly. When the difference here is they're still using AI, but they're using AI for idea. idea creation or images or helping craft some of the content, but not all of it, or updating their content, but they're involving humans to a much higher degree than they were earlier this year from what we're seeing.
Yeah, we've said this before, but the answer to winning with AI SEO is AI plus human beings. And so, you know, when we think about what LinkedIn is doing, their traffic is compounding. A couple months ago, we talked about this, they may be getting 1 or 2 million visits from this UGC content. Now it's like they're getting 3 million visits from it. And if it continues to stack, the growth rate continues to stack, it can become pretty significant. Maybe it can become 5, 10 million visits a month or maybe even more, right? And so I think that piece is interesting. I would say there's one trend that's popping up too is more and more people are talking about programmatic SEO. And what I will say with that is sure, you can create hundreds or thousands of these pages, things to do in Rome, things to eat in Japan or whatever. But here's the issue with that. If you're going to create thousands of these pages, how are you going to QA them? And so there's a rising need now to figure out how you can QA these pages at scale or else you're going to create a bunch of trash content and it's not going to be good for your site.
Dude. Okay, so check this out. There's 2 companies that I remember specifically because I was on the pitch. One was a fashion company, one was an auto company, and the auto company is large. And when I say auto company, they don't actually produce cars, but they are one of the most popular content sites for auto. Okay? So, and the fashion site, they have a lot of fashion content, but they also sell clothing and stuff like that. Both of them, we lost the pitches earlier this year. They decided to use no agencies and they ended up saying, hey, we don't like the SEO strategies that you guys are pitching. We're just going to use AI. We think we could do it more economical and drive more traffic. All right? The fashion site ended up hitting us up and then they now work with us. The auto site we're talking to, they don't work with us yet. Guess how much traffic the fashion site lost just from creating AI-based content with very little human interaction? They still had some humans help them out, but they were just posting literally thousands of articles through AI. Guess how much SEO traffic they gained or lost?
30%.
They lost a little bit more than 23%.
Okay, close. All right.
So overall their traffic went down because now their good pages aren't ranking as well either. And it's because overall the site has a ton of junk. The Auto site, guess how much traffic they're down?
60%.
No, not that bad, 38%. But they're also down, in my opinion, I don't have data on this, I think the AI stuff really hurt them. But I also think just general trends, people aren't buying as many cars right now. If you look at Tesla, they did price reductions. So I think they could be getting hurt on both ends, but 38% is a lot of traffic to be down. And a lot of their rankings, forget just traffic across the board, are down. And the main reason being is a lot more junk content. They still had human intervention. The auto site actually had more human intervention than the fashion site, but it was still a lot of junk data. And worst of all, a lot of the data was just inaccurate, right? Or the content was inaccurate, not data, but the stats, the data within the content were just inaccurate.
Yeah. I mean, that's a lot. And so how do you know how much content is like thousands per month? Is that what they were doing?
The auto site was creating around 700 pieces of content, 700 to 800 a month.
Okay. And what was, did they have strong domain authority? How did that look?
Really strong domain authority.
Wow. And do you think it was attributed specifically just to the AI stuff?
Yes.
Wow. That's incredible. So that's a big thing. That's why this whole QA thing, people aren't paying attention to it. If you're not going to QA it and figure out a way to— like what we do at the Marketing School content is we do— there's a— maybe the AI will produce the blog post, but basically the human being will jump in, fact-check it, add links, add other content as well, and add other images. And that makes it, that's basically a QA process over there. But again, if you're going to do the programmatic stuff, like for us when we're doing it, we're removing a ton of pages and we're going back and we're trying to figure out a way where we can have the AI QA it at scale, right? Like, does this actually make sense? So just keep that in mind if you're going to do this.
Yeah, so what else are you seeing with AI and SEO?
No, those are the 2 main things. I think the QA thing is rising, programmatic thing, you know, there continues to be like, it does well if you're doing it carefully. And then obviously the, The, we call AI enhanced content. That's like going to continue to be a thing like that. That's been a boon for, you know, us doing this pod, so.
Yeah, the biggest gains I'm seeing is updating your content using AI and having it help because then you can get more pieces updated. We're seeing that help with traffic gains. The biggest thing that we're seeing hurt with traffic gains is the AI content is junk, which is bringing down the overall score of the whole site, which is affecting rankings in a negative way, even the good pages. So don't put junk on your site. That's a really important thing that people mess up on.
Alright, so that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow. Bye.
