For anyone in content or SEO, it's been impossible to ignore the noise around ChatGPT for the past couple of years. Social feeds, industry forums, and conferences are all buzzing with the same question: "Will AI writing make us obsolete?" The reactions are mixed—some are anxious, others are excited, and many are cautiously experimenting.
As an SEO professional who both uses AI for content creation and leads a content team, I want to share a grounded perspective on this transformation. Let's explore the reality of AI's impact and how content professionals and agencies can navigate this new landscape.
The State of the Online Content Writing Market
Before we dive into AI, let's look at the existing ecosystem of content creation. It generally falls into a few models:
- Fully Outsourced: Companies rely entirely on freelancers or agencies for content, managing only topics and final approvals.
- Fully In-House: Content is produced by a dedicated internal team, ensuring tight control over brand voice and quality.
- Hybrid Model: A mix of both, where core projects are handled in-house and smaller tasks are outsourced for flexibility.
Each model has its pros and cons. Outsourcing is cost-effective but can lead to inconsistent quality. An in-house team is expensive but builds deep expertise and brand consistency. The arrival of AI has prompted everyone to reconsider which parts of this process can be automated and which still require a human touch.
- Low-Value Content: For purely informational, data-driven, or repetitive content, AI can produce it faster and cheaper than humans.
- High-Value Content: When it comes to strategic topic planning, in-depth research, brand-specific tone, and industry insights, human expertise remains irreplaceable.
A cautionary tale: One company used AI to mass-produce articles, only to be penalized by search engines for low-quality content. Their traffic plummeted, and they had to invest heavily in human writers to rewrite everything and recover. This proves that AI is not a magic bullet; it's a tool that must be used strategically.
Deconstructing the Content Creation Process
To understand AI's true impact, we need to break down the steps involved in creating successful SEO content:
| Phase | Tasks |
|---|---|
| Strategy | Topic ideation, defining the angle, source research and verification, content structuring. |
| Editorial | Content creation based on an editorial brief, proofreading, SEO quality control, brand alignment checks. |
| Publishing | Formatting, CMS integration, microdata implementation. |
In my experience, if a writer or service provider only offers a few of these tasks—typically just the writing and basic proofreading—they are highly susceptible to being replaced. Whether by another person, another agency, or by AI.
This is especially true for low-value-added content where the risk of an error is minimal. The "SEO quality control" might even be handled by a third party, with the writer only receiving feedback after the fact for minor tweaks.
What Would It Take for AI to Replace a Writer?
The ability of an AI to replace a human writer largely depends on its training. A tool like ChatGPT has its limitations, especially when compared to more customizable solutions where you can define a detailed editorial guide.
An editorial guide is a set of rules applied with varying degrees of flexibility. When these standards aren't explicitly documented, a writer's experience, good judgment, and creativity fill the gaps. This is where AI currently falls short.
Writing is More Than a Hard Skill
A skilled writer's profile combines multiple hard skills with a well-honed creative mind. The most challenging part to automate is the creative stage, which relies on subjective viewpoints.
| Task | Ease of Automation |
|---|---|
| Searching for information on a given topic | ✔️ Easy |
| Selecting appropriate content sources | Requires defined criteria (e.g., source authority, publication date). |
| Creating a summary | ✔️ Easy |
| Aligning content with marketing goals | Requires creativity, complex templating, and adaptation to specific objectives. |
It's ironic that some content providers who hire writers based on their unique style are now hoping to replace them with personality-free AI. The tasks that require good judgment, especially when the deliverable is a text that needs interpretation, are where writing becomes more of a soft skill.
Today's AI models (GPT-4 and beyond) can often write "better" than humans in a purely technical sense—grammatically correct and free of typos. For many applications, like user manuals for electronics, this is "good enough."
But for content that needs to persuade, inspire, or build a brand, "good enough" isn't good enough.
Where Can AI Create Real Cost Savings?
Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your perspective), ChatGPT is still far from being able to completely replace a professional human team.
However, identifying all the tasks within a project allows for partial automation. It also helps clarify which elements should be reserved for human intellect to maximize its value. In short, the more complex and demanding the editorial project, the less likely it is to be fully automated.
That said, automation presents a fantastic opportunity to:
- Scale content production to deliver more, faster.
- Simplify formatting tasks for quicker integration.
- Conduct rapid preliminary research on selected topics.
- Automate the creation of structured content like lists or tables.
The pricing for content is already evolving. To justify the cost of an AI solution (licenses, API calls, prompt engineering), the effort must be worthwhile.
The Dawn of a New Digital Transformation
The rise of AI in 2023 marks the beginning of a new digital transformation: the automation of low-value-added intellectual tasks. But isn't this what calculators and computers did for engineers decades ago?
So yes, ChatGPT and other AI solutions are changing the SEO content market. While some players creating low-value content may become cheaper due to economies of scale, another part of the industry will likely see its rates increase significantly.
It's up to those who want to stand out to demonstrate their expertise and skills—which may very well include leveraging AI as a powerful tool, not as a replacement for human creativity and strategic thinking.