Introduction

Have you ever encountered a web page that seemed strange? Even though it has the content you were looking for, the sentences seem oddly phrased. If you keep on reading, you may find that some sentences do not even fit the context. These are the signs of auto-generated content.

What Is Auto-Generated Content?

Auto-generated content refers to content generated using algorithms or programs without direct human intervention. This type of content can range from simple data compilations (stock market updates, weather reports, etc.) to more complex outputs (articles, reviews, etc.) using artificial intelligence (AI). Such content is often created solely to index a large number of web pages in SERPs.

Types of Auto-Generated Content

With the help of AI writing tools, you can now generate a variety of content pieces for your website. Some of the common auto-generated content types are:

  1. Social Media Posts

    Auto-generated content can help you publish and manage your social media posts. In addition to creating engaging content for your target audience, you can now use AI photo editors to generate images that match your social media posts.

  2. Product Descriptions

    With the help of AI writing tools, you can generate descriptions beyond the basic features and specifications. The auto-generated content can highlight unique selling points, address potential customer concerns, and answer frequently asked questions to encourage conversions.

  3. Landing Pages

    Organizations have started using automatically generated content to create landing pages. If you choose an advanced writing tool, it can analyze user behavior and suggest elements like social proof, testimonials, or limited-time offers to build trust.

  4. Blog Posts

    This is perhaps the most commonly used auto-generated content. If you have a topic in mind, you can tell the AI writing tool about it, and it will produce a decent blog post with useful information. Even though the content would require human review, the tools can do much of the heavy lifting.

  5. Emails

    Whether you are planning to run an email marketing campaign, send newsletters, or perform an outreach program, you can use auto-generated emails generated by AI tools. Again, you need to review the content before sending the emails, as errors can negatively affect you.

  6. News Articles

    If you have the necessary data and facts, you can feed them to the AI-writing tool to generate unbiased reports and news articles. These auto-generated reports can summarize key points and compile the data to deliver a comprehensive overview of the fed data.

  7. Scripts and Dialogs

    AI can develop engaging scripts for video content, voice-overs, and customer service chatbots. Since it can stimulate human-like conversations, you can use them to provide helpful responses and suggestions. Some advanced AI tools can create stories that offer insights into human emotions. Apart from these common types of auto-generated content, you may find instances of creative writing using AI tools. While you can experiment with different writing styles, themes, genres, and topics, automated tools still need to gain the creativity, emotions, and expressions you usually see in human-written content. However, AI writing tools are also improving with each passing day.

Pros and Cons of Auto-Generated Content

With the growing popularity of AI tools, organizations are taking a genuine interest in automated content creation processes. Let’s explore some of the major pros and cons of auto-generated content.

Pros of AI-Generated Content

  • Instant Creation of Content
An automated tool or AI content generator can instantly produce a piece of content per your requirements. Though the text is unpolished, you can find some useful information from it. With the introduction of technologies such as natural language processing (NLP), these tools are getting better at producing results that are quite close to human-written content, although human review is required.
  • Cost Efficiency
Generating automated content saves you time, effort, and resources. Though final editing is essential in such cases, you won’t need much work for the initial draft. Several organizations use this process to improve productivity while producing more content for their websites. Content specialists can use their skills and knowledge to perfect the auto-generated content to ensure the content can fetch positive results.
  • Relevant Topic Suggestions
While it can be difficult for human writers to come up with new content topics every time, AI tools can help you provide catchy, relevant, and meaty topics worth exploring. In fact, such tools can help you create proper outlines, suggest numerous areas to optimize, and more. Even though these mass auto-generated content pieces are no match for well-written human content, they can fulfill the need for content when human skill is unavailable.

Cons of AI-Generated Content

  • Lack of Human Touch
No matter how advanced the technology gets, it will still lack the human voice while writing. In most cases, the content reads as disjointed or incomprehensible. While human review can improve the quality of such content, it does not deliver the same results as human-written content. Even when AI tools can be effective in producing statistical or factual reports, they cannot produce expressive content where human emotions need to be involved.
  • Limited Accuracy
Auto-generated content often lacks accuracy as the content generation tools have limited knowledge. Since the knowledge bases of such tools are not updated periodically, you cannot expect high-quality content with up-to-date information from them. Since these tools are unaware of current events and certain trends, they cannot accurately draw conclusions about crucial topics.
  • No Original Ideas
AI content generation tools create content based on preexisting facts and data. Even if you ask them to generate content about abstract topics, they cannot come up with original ideas. Also, the content you generate using AI tools does not always focus on the user experience. You need a human writer for these things. Publishing auto-generated content on your website can lead to penalties from search engines like Google. Low-quality content that is duplicated or used for spamming can lead to lower search engine rankings and get your website flagged by Google’s algorithms.

Does Auto-Generated Content Hurt Your SEO?

Yes. Auto-generated content can hurt your website's SEO, as it is considered a black hat SEO tactic. Some auto-generated content does a good job of replicating human-written content, at least on the surface. However, if you look closely, auto-generated content exposes itself through jumbled and incoherent language. In such pieces of text, you can notice incorrect usage of synonyms. They simply scrape search results to rank for certain keywords. While there are instances of automatically generated content gaining higher search rankings in the short term, this does not qualify as a sustainable strategy. Search engines like Google prioritize content that offers value and a positive user experience. If your website features auto-generated content, readers will easily identify it and bounce from your web pages, sending a negative signal to the search engine. For highly competitive niches, where users expect high-quality content, automatically generated content may fail to deliver even short-term results. Since Google’s algorithm is constantly improving, they have the means to identify auto-generated content. For better SEO, it is always recommended that content be produced manually.

What Google Says About Auto-Generated Content?

Google defines spammy auto-generated text as “content that has been generated programmatically without producing anything original or adding sufficient value.” According to Google, auto-generated content breaches spam policies in the following instances:
  • When the auto-generated content does not take the user experience into account
  • While compiling content from various web pages without adding anything of substantial value
  • When the content includes target keywords but does not make sense in terms of readability
If your website features auto-generated content like this, it violates Google’s quality guidelines. This could lead to serious actions against your website that would negatively affect your website rankings and lead to lower organic traffic.

Should You Use Auto-Generated Content?

Search engines like Google want content that offers a positive user experience (UX). For such results, you need to produce content that is original, unique, and useful to the users. Since automatically generated content lacks those qualities, it generally delivers a bad UX. If you really wish to use auto-generated content for your website, you need to do some heavy editing on the mass auto-generated content before you can publish it on the internet. Even though AI-generated content has come a long way, you cannot completely rely on it for quality content. Unless you produce a large volume of content regularly, it is better to hire content specialists and produce content in the traditional way. This will add sufficient value to your content and offer a good user experience.

Conclusion

If you want your website content to secure and maintain a higher rank in the search engine results pages, you need to ensure it is original, serves users' search intent, offers value, and is optimized for search engines. No doubt, auto-generated content saves you time, effort, and resources, but it still cannot match the quality of human-written content.