Where AI genuinely helps
- Brainstorming topics and questions customers ask
- Summarising research and long documents
- Producing outlines and first drafts to edit
- Rewriting for different formats, such as a blog post into social posts
- Suggesting titles and meta descriptions to test
Where human expertise is essential
AI can state wrong facts confidently and tends towards generic writing. Original insight, real examples, opinions and anything legal, financial or medical need an expert's input and review.
What search engines say
Google's guidance focuses on whether content is helpful and reliable, not how it was produced. Mass-producing pages mainly to manipulate rankings is treated as spam regardless of whether a person or a machine wrote them.
A sensible workflow
- Brief: define audience, purpose and the expertise you will add
- Draft: use AI for structure and a starting draft
- Edit: add experience, examples and your own view
- Verify: check every fact, figure and claim against a source
- Publish and review: update the page as things change