Ethan Smith: AI should assist SEO research workflows, not autonomously generate articles
Ethan Smith · The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · Dec 1, 2022 · at 1:27:32
Ethan Smith, CEO of SEO agency Graphite, discusses best practices for using generative AI models in search engine optimization strategies.
0:00 / 0:56exact quote · 56.7s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Where AI is really useful is actually all the other stuff that I talked about. So if you think about the workflow of creating content and start with, what should I be writing about? What are the subtopics? So like, 300 different keywords. What are the sub themes? What's that outline? How is it performing? All of these things can be done really well with AI. So AI can extract structure. They can help me decide which topic to write by going through these thousands of keywords and clustering them and looking for overlaps and things like that. It could tell me what my topical authority is. It could sort them. It could go through the keywords and find these subtopic themes. It could do that, all of that really well. And then a human can write a piece of content. So given all that information, human can write a piece of content. They're a domain expert. They have wisdom. And they can write an article based on that structure. That's a great application of AI. What's not a great application of AI is writing a, an article to adjusting cancer treatments based on no, no underlying wisdom.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Ethan Smith
Smith: Google tracks post-click dwell time via Chrome and Android for ranking
“Google's tracking everyone through Chrome and Android, and they can actually see what happened after they left Google. And ultimately Google wants you to end your session or find the answer, find what you wanted on that page. So the more you click on, on our U…”
Smith: Early-stage startups can rank in AEO immediately through citations
“That's not the case for answer engine optimization because you can get mentioned by a citation tomorrow and start showing up immediately. You can have a Reddit thread. You can have a YouTube video. You can be mentioned on a blog, like a, you know, a brand new …”
Smith: Google's E-E-A-T signals show no observable effect on rankings
“Potentially Google has eat expertise, authority, trustworthiness, which actually I don't see having an effect unfortunately, but it could.”
Smith: Google VP confirmed publisher referral traffic is up slightly
“Google published something recently. Their VP of search explicitly said, I looked at our, the traffic that we're sending to publishers and it is not down. It's up slightly. So it is not true that Google search is going down.”
Smith: Only 10 to 12% of Google and ChatGPT results are AI-generated
“It was around 10 to 12% of content in Google search and in ChatGPT are AI generated. 90% or not.”
Smith: There is more AI-generated content online than human-created content
“We found that there's more AI generated content on the internet than human generated content. So back to the common crawl study, we looked at a 100,000 different URLs over the past five years. And then you can see this curve where AI generated is now higher th…”