When I started blogging in 2005, search engine optimization was simple: write what you want, then stuff in your target keyword as many times as possible. As Google evolved, so did SEO strategies, becoming increasingly complex and prescriptive.
By the early 2020s, I found myself wondering: does the perfect piece of content exist?
This question led me on a journey through the world of SEO, from freelance writing to founding Ellipsis. I’ve witnessed the growing divide between “SEO content” and valuable writing.
Recent AI developments have exposed flaws in the industry’s approach to content creation, challenging the notion of “perfect” content.
In this article, I’ll explore how AI has changed SEO practices, why pursuing perfect content is misguided, and what this means for the future of content creation. I’ll argue that successful content lies not in ticking boxes, but in leveraging AI to amplify human expertise.
Subjective vs objective
Before Ellipsis, I freelanced as a marketer, with writing as my main gig, churning out 1,000 words/hour.
I’d get articles back: “Hey Alex, we like this but it doesn’t have a green light in Yoast. Could you fix that?”
For a while, I complied. Slowly this became more frustrating: the optimization often made the article worse; stuffing target keyword into another heading wasn’t fooling anyone.
During this period, SEO Content and “good” content started diverging:
- SEO Content is a game where you create bad content that meets objective criteria
- Good content is editorial, insightful, and expertise-driven!
The 2010s saw a significant increase in sophistication in SEO Content. As Google got smarter, there were many more criteria to consider. We moved beyond keyword density to reading scores, sentence structure, and formatting (and more).
SEO Content has become further and further from “good” content. It’s often seen as a necessary evil; I wouldn’t read or find it useful, but it’s for the nebulous other people who are fooled by this.
I became fascinated by playing this game. If you follow the SEO Content’s objective criteria to its logical conclusion, is it possible to create the perfect piece of content?
SEO Content has been getting less and less useful. I wrote a couple of weeks ago about my experience trying to buy a new phone: it was impossible to get beyond the endless “best phone” results into any actual insight.
How is it possible to create the perfect piece of content, that’s also useless?
GenAI shows the SEO emperor has no clothes on
The SEO emperor has no clothes, and it’s taken generative AI to show this. 2 flaws have been exposed in the SEO content game:
- With AI-generated articles flooding the internet, it’s clear that following a set of objective criteria doesn’t always produce valuable content. These AI-written pieces can tick all the SEO boxes, yet fail to provide genuine insight or expertise.
- Google, Perplexity, and others are able to satisfy searchers with short summaries, showing the folly of the SEO check boxes in the first place. It turns out nobody needed those boxes.
The journey we’ve been on over the last 2 years has been to abandon many of the checkboxes. All that matters is making the content useful to the reader.
It’s not about meeting arbitrary metrics, but offering unique perspectives, in-depth analysis, and real-world experience. The perfect piece of content, it turns out, isn’t about perfection in the traditional SEO sense. It’s about authenticity, expertise, and providing genuine value to readers.
I no longer believe the perfect piece of content exists
I built FALCON AI three and a half years ago to solve the problem of hit-and-miss content. FALCON AI uses Machine Learning mixed with genAI to predict which titles, meta, headings, etc, are going to deliver the best performance for a target keyword.
FALCON AI has always been focused on the bare-bones that make up a piece of content – your title, meta, etc – with the writing left to a human expert.
Even this revolves around the idea of there being an objective best piece of content for a target keyword. GPT-5 is around the corner: will it be possible to generate the best text, then?
I no longer believe the perfect piece of content exists. If it did, we’d have objective criteria for it and genAI could create it. But that would remove subjectivity, creativity, and expertise from the process.
Ellipsis uses a LOT of AI, but not to write articles. This is confusing: “AI” + “content agency” = “ChatGPT -> generate articles”. We use genAI to do things never possible before: write 1,000 title variations and pick the best; undertake 3 days of research, etc.
Here are two practical ways you can balance SEO needs with authentic, expertise-driven content:
- Use AI for research and ideation, not writing: leverage AI tools to gather data on your topic, generate multiple title variations, or conduct extensive research using trusted sources for grounding to avoid hallucination. Then, have human experts interpret this data and craft original content.
- Focus on covering topics thoroughly rather than meeting arbitrary metrics: Instead of trying to hit specific keyword densities or word counts, aim to cover all relevant aspects of a topic that competing content addresses. This aligns with search intent without sacrificing quality or readability.
These strategies allow us to leverage AI’s strengths while maintaining the human expertise that truly sets content apart.”
Use AI to handle tasks for writers so they can focus on producing the best content possible. There are no longer objective criteria.
This is dangerous, because it revolves a lot more around expertise. There are still SEO requirements but they have more nuance: cover the perfect amount of topics found in competing content to match the search intent. But, you can’t put a green light against this. However with the right talent, the right team, you can pull off winning content at a scale your competitors can’t match.
The future of content is embracing human-AI collaboration
As we navigate this new content creation landscape, the old rules no longer apply. The myth of perfect content, built on SEO checkboxes and algorithmic appeasement, has been shattered by the technology that promised to perfect it.
This isn’t the end of quality content – far from it. We’re entering an era of unprecedented opportunity for those who understand how to harness AI’s power while keeping the irreplaceable human elements that resonate with readers.
The future of content relies on a symbiotic relationship between human expertise and AI capabilities:
- AI as Amplifier: Use AI tools for research, data analysis, and basic structuring, freeing up human creators to focus on insight and storytelling.
- Expertise as Differentiator: In a sea of AI-generated content, deep subject knowledge and unique perspectives will become more valuable.
- Creativity as Currency: As AI handles formulaic content creation, human creativity – making unexpected connections and presenting ideas in novel ways – will be at a premium.
- Authenticity as Authority: Readers will seek out content that feels genuine, personal, and rooted in real-world experience.
The perfect piece of content does not exist, but that’s what makes content creation exciting. Every article, blog post, or video is an opportunity to connect with your audience in a way no algorithm can replicate.
As content creators, our challenge is to surprise, delight, and inform our human readers instead of just appeasing search engines. By embracing AI strengths and our human capabilities, we can create memorable, shareable, and actionable content.
The era of checkbox SEO is over. Welcome to the age of augmented creativity, where imagination is the only limit.
