If you've followed me on LinkedIn or on this website you've seen a lot of talk of how generative AI has radically changed the field of search engine optimization.
I'm not alone, in a recent poll of Finnish CMOs we found that over 84% of marketing teams use generative AI tools for content creation and 85% of marketing leaders expect their SEO agencies and freelance partners to actively invest into AI as part of their service.
While there is a lot of hype around generative AI, in the case of SEO the enthusiasm is mostly justified. At my recent CMO gig we 22x organic visits within 12 months after switching to an AI driven content strategy. This was done mainly by combining ChatGPT Plus with a wide array of existing SEO tools, methods and processes.
Since jumping into the rabbit hole of generative AI content productions I've come across a wide array of different kinds of new tools. Over the past year I've tested a dozen different tools and there are literally hundreds of AI content generation tools that have emerged since then.
With so many tools on the market, it's helpful to step back and reflect on what makes them different. In my first solution review I go through AIContentfy. This tool was developed by Teemu Raitaluoto and his team to solve the problem of ambitious content teams looking to make a big impact on a small budget.
In the video below we sit down with Teemu himself and go through a demo of how the solution works in practice.
There are many tools available today that focus on AI content generation. What makes AIContentfy stand out?
In my view, this is the first tool I see that focuses on an end-to-end process for SEO content production. Here is a crude way I would visualize it.
AIContentfy makes an effort to replace the toggling from one tool to another by consolidating most of the work done by content creators into one tool. You can run a complete workflow for creating one (or more) blog articles within the tool in a really simple guided process. Not only that, the tool is integrated to popular CMS systems, so you can end up publishing new content in a streamlined way from keyword research to all the way publication.
I've seen tools like SEMrush and Surfer SEO tackle more than one part of the SEO workflow, but none have as a linear and direct way of working as AIContentfy.
AIContentfy gives a remarkably consistent end-to-end workflow for generating SEO-optimized content, but it's not yet the only tool you'll ever need. I've marked a couple of those workflow steps as grey for a purpose. Currently, the keyword functionality is a bit more limited, but Teemu mentioned it's on the roadmap.
Also, the tool does allow you to create articles in many different languages, but it doesn't yet fully replace tools like Weglot that machine translate your edited content automatically. In my tests, I generated content in Finnish in an acceptable level of quality, but I did get notably better results when creating content in English.
The articles that I generated were remarkably detailed and aligned with core SEO content templates, but did have some editorial issues. The biggest issues were to do with repetition. In a longer article there were times when similar sentences were used more than once without clear reason. I thought the end result was a good first draft, but definitely requiring an editorial eye before publication.
Important note: While tools like AIContentfy enable you to publish content in a very streamlined and efficient way, they do not remove the need for human expertise and editorial control. In my view any articles you generate should be used as a initial draft and you should never publish purely AI generated content on your website.
Another unique aspect I've seen from AIContenfy is their expansion into SEO services. In addition to the self-service tool, they provide both link building and content marketing services.
In other words, they provide inbound external links as a service on a $100 cost-per-link basis and they have a human editorial team who create articles on your behalf at a minimum rate of $1000 for 10 articles a month.
The combination of tool and service is not something I've seen before, but in the case of AIContentfy it makes sense. A layer of human expert in the content creation and link building process can go a long way to compliment a scalable content generation engine. If AIContentfy can build a team of SEO experts and services to compliment their tool, they can give the best parts of human and artificial intelligence in a scalable way.
AiContentfy looks to be remarkably capable of scaling up content production to anyone who intends to cover a large number of topics on their website.
A good example is the AIContentfy.com website itself, where Teemu's team have created close to 5000 articles in the second half of 2023 alone. They now have over 200,000 website visitors per month and a domain rating above 70. In a recent post Teemu mentioned they now get over 5000 signups for the tool each month.
Another use case I can imagine is smaller businesses without SEO resources. Many small business owners don't have the resources to focus on SEO, build backlinks, or hire content marketers. For them, this could be an easy to subscribe SEO content solution, especially if it is bundled up with the editorial or link building services.
In the March 2024 Core Update Google rolled out some major changes that address spam and low quality content at scale. Some websites that had catalogs of hundreds or thousands of low-quality AI-generated pages were wiped out overnight.
As things stand, there is a major division between SEO content creators between those who focus on programmatic and scalable content creation and those who focus only on human created content.
In my view the AI generated vs human created discussion is not so black and white. I don't think Google is able to, or even focused on, removing all AI generated content from search results. Instead, the focus is more on helpful content and ensuring that poorly created and unreliable content does not become widespread.
As SEO content creators you should always be creating content from the perspective of the end user, and not the search engine. Tools like AIContentfy will allow you to do your work quicker and more effectively, but the tools should not be used to generate masses of poor quality content.
AIContentfy is definitely a solution that any content marketer or SEO specialist should try out. The free trial is pretty extensive and worth testing.
Whether it ends up replacing your existing workflow, or gives you inspiration on how to do your work more efficiently, AIContentfy gives a radically simple perspective on how SEO-focused content can be generated in a streamlined and scalable way.
I can't say how good quality the backlink building and human editorial content services are, but they do make sense as options to consider if you don't have the in-house resources for strategic SEO.
I'm especially looking to hear some case studies of real businesses using the tool to get impactful business results. The landscape for AI content generation tools is developing fast. It will be interesting to see which direction AIContentfy develops, and how other solutions adapt similar approaches.