Thanks to everyone who came out to @smx #smx and happy birthday @sengineland

After analyzing 42,000 blog posts with an AI detector, content classified as fully human-written outperformed AI-generated or mixed content across the top 10 positions. The gap is most striking at position 1: 80.5% probability of being human-written vs just 10% AI-generated. This may appear to conflict with survey data showing that 72% of SEOs believe AI content ranks as well as human-written content. However, the data points to a more nuanced reality. The key difference emerges at the very top of the rankings. From position 5 onward, the performance gap between human-written and AI-generated content narrows significantly. In other words, AI content performs competitively when the benchmark is ranking on page one. However, in the highest-ranking positions, human-written content clearly leads. Full study: social.semrush.com/4ekwL7Y.

The case study: scaling AI content is working! The reality:

"We found that AI assistants send visitors to 404 pages 2.87x more often than Google Search." -> How Often Do AI Assistants Hallucinate Links? (16 Million URLs Studied) "ChatGPT is the greatest offender, with 1.01% of clicked URLs and 2.38% of all cited URLs returning a 404 status (compared to baseline 404 rates of 0.15% and 0.84% respectively)." ahrefs.com/blog/how-often-do… via @thinking_slow

Now AI Mode is also the first option in actual results, even before "All".

99% of AI Overviews are triggered by informational queries. 💬 To get featured, create high-quality, direct answers to user questions! Use tools like WPBeginner #Keyword Generator’s “Questions” tab for #content ideas.