Is this AI SEO heist amoral or genius?

Plus, why you shouldn't use AI to give consumers purchase recommendations

Author

Charlie Braithwaite
November 28, 2023

 

AI Marketing School Newsletter #73

Hi there marketers,

Welcome to AI Marketing School, where we’re helping marketers harness AI to its full potential.

Today, we’re looking at:

  • An “amoral” AI SEO heist—and how to protect your content

  • Don’t use AI to give consumers purchase recommendations

  • Today’s recommended marketing GPT

Hope you enjoy the issue.

Charlie & Tom

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AI IN ACTION

Is this SEO heist amoral? (And how to protect your content)

Jake Ward recently explained how he pulled off an “SEO heist” using AI. 

But not everybody was impressed with his playbook. 

Media outlets jumped on the backlash, showing expletive-laden responses from X users angry that Jake used “AI-generated slop” to outrank good content.

As one user said, “If you think searching for useful info online is harder than it used to be... it's about to get a lot worse.”

So, what do you think? Is this a genius AI marketing strategy? Or is it an example of how AI is changing SEO for the worse?

How marketers can protect their content

Worried about competitors doing this to your content? Here’s how you can retouch it to protect your search rankings.

Credit to Justin Dunham for these insights.

  • Include original insights from internal thought leaders

  • Add data from your own products

  • Consider taking a slightly different, or even controversial, angle

  • Reframe the problem/subject in a novel manner

  • Add resources that help your prospects become customers

  • Enhance your user experience (e.g. by making the content easily scannable, including multimedia elements, and so on)

BITESIZED RECOMMENDATIONS

Don’t use AI to help consumers make a purchase—here’s why

Recent Storyblok research shows that 85% of consumers aren’t interested in using AI to help them decide on a purchase. 

60% say AI recommendations wouldn’t make them more likely to buy something. Meanwhile, 17% said it would actively make them less likely to make a purchase. 

The takeaway? AI is great for completing work internally—but consumers don’t yet trust its purchase suggestions.

TODAY’S MARKETING GPT

Brand Advisor

Looking to brainstorm your brand’s upcoming campaigns? Look no further. Brand Advisor is a custom-built GPT focus tester for brands, offering insights on campaign ideas.  

BONUS RESOURCES

Here are a few great AI marketing resources and tools that we’ve come across recently. Enjoy!

AI note-taker that records your meetings without a bot joining the calls. Install the free extension.

Jason Ball explains why you need to emphasize the ‘Experience’ part of E-E-A-T in your thought leadership content more than ever if you want to rise above AI-generated content. 

Inflection, the AI startup aiming to create “personal AI for everyone”, has just released its new LLM, Inflection-2. Inflection-2 was trained on over 5,000 NVIDIA GPUs, beats Google’s PaLM 2 in various tests, and will soon power the company’s Pi AI assistant.  

What did you think of today’s email?

Loved it? Hated it? Hit reply and tell us why.

Happy marketing. We’ll see you again on Friday.

Charlie & Tom