When ChatGPT first appeared at the end of 2022, my immediate thought was for the copywriting craft I’d spent over two decades perfecting. The zeitgeist after November 2022 was that anyone could “write their own copy” now, no professional needed..
Then, about eighteen months later, Google started tightening up. Its “helpful content updates” and a slew of anti-spam measures began pushing low-grade website copy out of the index.
And yet here we are in 2026, and still not valuing human skills over AI slop. So I want to talk about what happens when businesses forget that, with a bit of data to back up my claim.
A Couple of Articles
Last year I offered my services to a business that needed fresh content on its website. I drafted two pieces of well-written and well-researched content designed to do more than just get clicks and be read. What I was looking for, over and above their historical writing, was:
- The two new articles were deliberately written to bring a new perspective to a service the business offered but had never quite worked out how to write about with any depth or sincerity,
- They were written from the viewpoint of someone who’d actually done the work, rather than the theoretical angle the company had taken until then,
- And they’d be the first in a planned series of thought leadership and industry updates: useful for readers, and a clear signal of the firm’s own understanding of the complex subjects and services I was covering for them.
So I wrote, edited and published the two pieces.
And the response?
Crickets.
I was keen to keep the momentum going, as I’d had a long history of success in serial writing for websites. But the decision seemed to stall at the top of their organisation. My two fresh, topical articles sat on their timeline, and there seemed to be no appetite to commit to posting any more.
Months went by.
A Year Later, a Post Appears
I checked in every now and then to see how things were going at this organisation, and whether anything new had gone up. There was nothing new published for the best part of a year. I regularly reminded them, quite nicely, that I was still around if they wanted to keep building on what we’d started. But the enthusiasm just wasn’t there.
And then one day, out of nowhere, and nearly a year after those first two pieces of mine were originally published, a new post appeared. A single blog article.
I was pleased that they’d finally decided to start publishing again, and sat down to read it properly.
It wasn’t good.
I could see it straight away, which is second nature after enough years of doing this. The body copy was just under 400 words (Thin content, low-effort content). Every section was a short stack of four-word bullet points stating the obvious, with no concrete insight or evidence behind any of them. There was no argument, no statistics, no named examples, no point of view. It opened with an “I’ll share…” line and then immediately abandoned any sense of a human author in favour of impersonal lists. It was absolutely textbook AI-generated.
Then, out of curiosity, I asked Claude AI to compare it with the last piece I’d written for them, just to sanity-check my own read. It reached the same conclusion I had: thin, generic, and unlikely to rank or earn citations in AI search because there was nothing in it to set the business apart from anyone else making the same claims. That’s what’s called commodity content.
BTW I’ve changed or removed details throughout to protect the firm and its sector.
For balance, Claude’s analysis of my work was fair and candid about its flaws. The example piece I shared as a comparison was apparently solid, well-informed and clearly human-authored: it opened by placing the topic inside a longer arc of industry change, referenced the subject’s near-27-year history, and used correct, specific terminology with a genuine insider perspective. In E-E-A-T terms, it ticked all the boxes that Google’s quality raters are trained to look for.
It also told me that the conclusion to my article was the weakest part, slipping into boilerplate and slightly undercutting the authority built up earlier. Fair enough. A stronger close would have extended the argument or left the reader with something to act on, and that’s exactly the kind of thing I’ll tighten next time, even though I have a habit of closing on a CTA.
The standard cuts both ways, and so it should.
What the Data Actually Says
But here’s the part that really matters, because opinions are cheap and the search data is not.
In the past month, my two articles pulled around 500 impressions in Google Search. That’s not a huge number, and I won’t pretend otherwise, but it’s two pieces getting on for a year old, ranking on average around the top of page two and the top of page five. That’s quite modest.
But what’s genuinely interesting is the search queries: my articles were surfacing for terms that I never set out to target, so the content is doing work I didn’t even plan for. That’s the bit I find genuinely inspiring. (Ideas for more new blogs?)
But this company’s new, “low-effort” post? Nowhere. Not a single appearance in search. And the run of pieces published since, apparently part of a fresh campaign, don’t seem to be landing either.
I’m not writing this to be critical. The point is simpler than that: quality compounds quietly, and thin content doesn’t, however many ChatGPT-generated “articles” you publish. If those campaigns don’t perform the way the business is hoping, they know where I am. No hard feelings.
Call the Professionals
Plenty of businesses now believe they can use AI to write their articles, and the fact is that they can. They don’t have to be writers any more. But somewhere in that shift, a lot of them have quietly retired the experts and decided that they’re writers themselves all of a sudden.
The decision seemed to be made more on cost, time, and even convenience. What’s more important, commericaly and even ethically, is experience, capability, and a track record of results. Without decades of writing experience, stacked on top of a working knowledge of SEO, digital marketing, E-E-A-T, Natural Language Processing (NLP), entities, sentiment, vectors and a bit of good old life experience, AI output stays exactly that: output. It’s the expertise shaping the tool that turns it into something that ranks, gets cited, and actually gets clicks and views.
If you want that human touch in your marketing, give me a call on 01252 692 765 or leave a message on my contact form. I’ll be more than happy to help you build something quality that performs and lasts.