“A lot of people are selling purely AI-generated copy, and we are already hearing about websites losing traffic from using this strategy,” —Laine White, Marketing Consultant & Innovation Strategist @ Uptick Marketing.
You might be wondering whether it’s a good idea to use AI to write your marketing content. And in the same vein: Is AI content bad for SEO?
In this guide, our content marketing specialists provide a TL;DR (the quick answer, short and sweet), then a deep dive for those who want to really understand the link between AI content, content quality, and website traffic.
Is AI Content Bad for SEO? TL;DR
AI content is not inherently harmful to SEO or AEO. However, publishing or posting AI content without thorough editing and review by a proficient writer or copy editor can result in lifeless, redundant, or inaccurate content that causes pages to lose rankings, traffic, and opportunities for AI citations. It works best as a tool—not a trusted creative or decision maker—for a human-led strategy centered on originality, authority, usefulness, and clear answers.
Why Purely AI-Generated Copy Isn’t Ideal for SEO (Even for AEO)
There’s high demand for companies to handle their usual responsibilities while also ensuring they drive business to their website, especially if they mostly do online sales or have only seen success with digital marketing after struggling with traditional marketing methods. To keep up, many businesses are using AI to write their marketing content. Even some marketing directors are using AI-generated copy as part of their strategy.
But as we mentioned above, it’s not the best idea, SEO-wise, to just copy, paste, and hit “publish” on AI-generated content. Let’s dive deeper into the reasons:
Traffic Drop + Visibility Loss
Website pages filled with low-quality AI-generated content can earn early search visibility, making the easiest content strategy seem like the one that’ll be most successful at drawing traffic—but only at first. As search engines continue evaluating content quality over time, pages that lack originality or genuine expertise tend to quickly lose rankings, reducing both organic traffic and their chances of being surfaced in AI-generated answers.
Penalties from Google/Bing or AI Agents
Google and Bing’s concern is not AI writing assistance. They’re actually taking issue with scaled, low-value content created solely to influence rankings, and are working to demote their rankings through both manual and algorithmic actions. AI agents may exact a different kind of penalty by excluding generic, low-support content from the sources they surface, summarize, or cite.
Dreaded “AI Slop”
Love it or hate it, the internet has chosen the not-so-technical term “AI slop” for low-effort, low-value AI-generated content. It can introduce hallucinated facts, flatten genuine expertise into substance-devoid summaries, and create copycat pages that compete for the same queries through keyword cannibalization.
When AI-generated material is the primary or only source AI pulls from to create more content, errors and uncanny sameness can feed back into the available information, weakening the trust and originality signals that search engines and answer engines use to decide what to rank or cite.
Plagiarism Concerns
Accidental plagiarism happens more than English professors like to admit. There are endless combinations of sentences you can write with just one language, and sometimes, people just approach the same topic in similar ways.
On the other hand, AI-generated plagiarism is rarely a coincidence (even if the prompt writer isn’t aware that it has occurred).
AI-generated content can overlap with existing wording or combine material from several pages without preserving their original context or attribution, raising concerns about plagiarism, integrity, intellectual property, and copyright claims. Before publishing, teams should verify facts, rewrite in their own words, and cite appropriate sources to create more original and trustworthy content for both search users and AI systems.
Let’s Adjust Your Strategy for Success
AI can support writers in brainstorming, research, organization, and refinement, but successful SEO and AEO still require human creativity, subject-matter expertise, strategic structure, and careful verification.
Uptick Marketing can help you create content that answers real questions, demonstrates authority, and is easier for search engines and AI tools to understand and cite. Get in touch with us today to develop a content strategy that aligns with how people are searching today.
