Is it smart to write your website copy with AI? We found out for you!
Prompt in, full web copy out, easy peasy. For many entrepreneurs, writing website copy with AI feels like the perfect shortcut: fast, free (or nearly), and no copywriter needed. But what does that actually do to your visibility in Google? We dug into five major studies from Semrush, Ahrefs, SE Ranking and others to answer that question.
What the numbers say
Five recent studies (Semrush, Digital Applied, Ahrefs, SE Ranking and Rankability) together analysed tens of thousands of pages to determine how AI content performs in Google. The conclusion is strikingly consistent: in every one of these studies, content that's (partly) written by humans outperforms content that's fully AI-generated.
A few figures to back that up:
- Position 1 in Google is, according to Semrush, 8 times more likely to be a human-written page than a fully AI-generated one.
- Semrush calculated that human-written content has an 80.5% chance of ranking in position 1, compared to a much smaller chance for pure AI copy.
- Rankability found that 83% of top results for competitive keywords are human-written.
- Research from Digital Applied showed that purely AI-generated content ranked, on average, 23% lower than human-written articles.
- Ahrefs found that only 4.6% of top-ranking pages are fully AI-generated, with no human editing.
What's also interesting is what SE Ranking discovered about the timeline. They published 2,000 AI-generated articles across 20 brand-new websites and tracked them for 16 months. The first few months looked promising: by month 2 and 3, 28% of those pages were already in the top 100. But after that, the share plummeted to just 3%. Exactly the pattern you don't want if you've just launched a new website: a brief peak, followed by a prolonged slump.
Why it's more nuanced than "AI doesn't work"
Important to know: this is about fully automated content, without any human check, structure or strategy. Google doesn't literally penalise the word "AI". What does matter is content that:
- Actually adds something (a genuine insight, experience or substantiation).
- Is built around a search strategy, with the right keywords, structure and internal links.
- Aligns with the rest of your site in terms of E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness).
A quick prompt-and-paste text usually misses all three. But use those same AI tools under the guidance of an experienced AI and SEO specialist, and you combine the speed of AI with a solid strategy that makes your website findable (and keeps it that way).
What does this mean for your website?
If you tackle AI on your own, you run into a number of risks:
- Short-term results, no long-term growth: as in the SE Rankings study, you might grab some visibility at first, but without a strategy you'll fade again after a few months.
- No keyword research: AI tools write what you ask them to, but they don't know which search terms your potential customers actually use, or how competitive those terms are.
- No technical or structural SEO: content is only part of the story. Internal links, load speed, structured data and a logical site structure all help determine whether Google takes your content seriously.
- No time to monitor it: SEO isn't a one-off action. Rankings shift, algorithms change, competitors update their content. If you're not keeping track of that consistently, you slowly lose ground.
So, never use AI?
Certainly not. AI is an excellent tool, but the difference between "a text that's there" and "a text that delivers customers" really lies in the strategy around it.
And that's precisely where an SEO agency like The Dare Company makes the difference. We use AI too, to work faster, but certainly not to replace the work. Strategy, keyword research, structure and quality control remain human work. That way you combine the best of both worlds: the speed of AI, with the results of a well-thought-out approach.
Curious whether your current copy is making the difference? Get in touch with The Dare Company for a no-obligation SEO check.