Should You Use AI to Write Your Content

I’ve been thinking about SEO recently. More specifically, I’ve been thinking that I should probably write more articles for our website.

There are plenty of good reasons to. Useful articles can answer questions potential customers ask, show what we know, and give people more opportunities to discover us through search. They can also give other websites something worth linking to.

Of course, deciding that I should write more articles is one thing. Finding the time to write them is another.

And there is now a growing number of companies offering what sounds like the perfect solution. Their systems can analyse my website, work out what I should be ranking for, find gaps in my content and identify subjects I should be writing about. Then AI can write the articles for me, steadily building a library of search-optimised content while I get on with running my business.

On the face of it, that solves my problem. I don’t have enough time to write as much as I’d like, and AI can produce almost limitless amounts of content for me.

But that only solves the problem if producing more content is the objective.

But I don’t want to write articles just because they might improve our position on Google. I think good SEO content should start with having something worth saying, not finding a search term and creating an article to target it.

I want to write about things I find interesting: things I’ve learned, things I disagree with, things I’ve got wrong and, occasionally, things I think everyone else is getting wrong.

Not everybody will care, and that’s fine. But the people who do will learn something about how I think. If that resonates with them, perhaps they’ll decide we’re the sort of people they’d like to work with.

That feels very different from treating content as an SEO commodity.

An AI SEO system might analyse my website and discover 100 subjects relevant to web design, then write all 100 articles for me. That is genuinely impressive if quantity is the goal. But does anyone need me to publish an article about something I haven’t thought about, based on research I haven’t done, containing opinions I haven’t expressed, simply because a computer has calculated that people search for it?

And even if an AI-generated article succeeds in bringing somebody to my website, what will they learn about me when they get here? I’d rather someone read one article that genuinely represents how I think than ten that happen to rank well but could just as easily have appeared on somebody else’s website. Google itself appears to be thinking along similar lines.

At this point, you might be expecting me to declare AI the devil’s work and argue that humans should lovingly handcraft articles. We are a publishing company, after all.

But, here’s the truth: I use AI. In fact, I used it to help write this article. The idea itself came from looking at these automated SEO systems and wondering whether they might be useful.

What AI didn’t do was decide what I should write about. I used it to help me work through an idea in conversation. I can argue with it, change my mind, reject what it suggests and via this process, I can gradually work out what I actually want to say.

That’s particularly useful to me because I’m a graphic designer, not a writer. AI helps me get my thoughts onto the page, but it doesn’t suddenly equip me with the judgement and experience of a professional writer.

That’s where Jennie comes in. An accomplished journalist and editor, her role goes much further than tidying up what I’ve written. She questions the argument, spots things I’ve missed, cuts what doesn’t need to be there and makes sure the finished article says what I think it says.

In fact, when Jennie read the first draft of this article, she spotted something neither AI nor I had considered: by explaining how useful I find AI, was I inadvertently suggesting that businesses no longer need writers like her?

I don’t think I am. AI has given me a very useful way to develop my own ideas, but it hasn’t made me a writer. And it certainly hasn’t replaced the value of having an experienced editor question what I’ve produced.

That’s a very different proposition from asking AI to find a keyword I’m missing and manufacture an opinion for me.

Jennie has been thinking about the same question from the other side – what does AI mean for someone who has spent her career as a journalist and editor? Read Jennie’s take: Giving AI Something to Write About.

Jeff Cooper. 27 September 2026

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