When is it ok to use AI, and when is it not ok??
Well now that's the big question isn't it!! AI has exploded, it's here to stay, that much I think we can all agree on. And right now, Q3 2025, AI is capable of writing complete articles for you, it can create images that look like photos from just a few prompts and it can create video clips of literally whatever you want.
There's no doubt, the prospect is enticing.
For the last five years or so the plan for digital marketers has been pretty consistent - churn out copy which aligns with your brand fill it with keywords that the search engines are going to pick up, drop in relevant images with alt text that will also catch the eye of Google's bots crawling your site.
But... here's the deal. Now that AI is here, everyone can do that. Literally everyone. Anyone can have 100 on-point, keyword rich articles on their website in 24 hours, with zero outlay, no one hired to write for them, hardly any work on the part of the business owner.
So, between two websites that both have pages and pages of content that hits all the required keywords... how does Google tell the difference? How do they prioritise and put one website higher in the search results than another?
These are exactly the questions that Google staff are asking themselves as well. The internet landscape is in the process of changing wildly. The algorithms are going to catch up soon and the websites that get rewarded and those that get punished is going to change with it.
Image recognition is going to become more and more important in site crawls - what are your images on your website, are they consistent, do they feature the same faces? Does it seem to the search engines that these are genuine photos of your team, or are they possibly AI generated? Genuine content gets promoted, AI content get dropped.
All the search engines are working hard to apply image recognition to videos too. And once they do, they're going to be looking for consistency there as well. What is in your videos, are they home grown? Do they offer value to the viewer?
So, when do we want to use AI and when do we not?
The key here, we believe, is using AI judiciously. What AI should be used for is leg work - by all means use AI to give you the bulk of an article, for example, but then you must take that article and make it your own. The more you re-write the better. We'd suggest that you re-write the whole thing. You can use the AI article to give you a structure and some bulk, but then you need to make your mark on it.
It can only be a matter of time before AI models work out how to identify AI generate content and begin to discount it in their rankings. See our article on AI and compound errors here.
With all this in mind, the right time to use AI, if you have to use it at all, is at the beginning of your content creation. But then we feel you must leave it behind. The algorithms are going to start punishing AI content, because anyone can do it. So it doesn't do anything for your website authority, it doesn't tell the search engines anything about who you are, because it's been generate by a machine.
We don't use AI in any of our content creation. We didn't use AI to create this article. We started writing and here it is. And we think that's going to make the difference as this AI boom runs its course.