AI Content vs Human Content: Which is Better for SEO in 2025?

Without SEO, it’s nearly impossible to drive traffic or to rank highly in search results. With artificial intelligence (AI) getting better, the option of using AI-generated content to quickly and at scale create website and blog content is available. This raises an important question: should you use AI content or human-written content for the best SEO results in 2025?

This article examines the pros and cons of both from an SEO perspective.

We’ll cover topics like quality, personalization, creativity, voice and tone consistency, and more. Read on to learn which content type is likely to fare better for SEO in the coming years.

Table of Contents

The Rise of AI Content Creation Tools

First, what do we mean by “AI content?” AI content creation tools are tools powered by artificial intelligence that enable artificial intelligence to generate text for blogs, product descriptions, emails, social media and more content. Popular tools like Jasper, Copy.ai, and Jarvis will help you create content by just writing a few prompts and parameters. In turn, tools such as Smodin (https://smodin.io/ai-content-detector) allow you to detect text generated by AI.

Some key stats on the growth of AI content creation:

The AI content creation market is projected to grow from $2.3 billion in 2024 to $7.9 billion by 2033, a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 7.7%. (GlobeNewswire Research)
Now, 80 percent of marketers leverage some form of AI content generation (WebFX)
70% of early-stage startups use AI writing assistants to write website copy, social media posts, and blog content. (Kruze)

Clearly, AI content creation is accelerating. The quality of AI-generated text continues to improve, too. But does it compare to human writing for SEO?

AI Content Pros and Cons for SEO

Here are the main advantages and disadvantages of using AI-generated text instead of human writers for SEO:

AI Content Pros:

Speed and scale – AI tools are faster and scale better than any human writer. Mass production of blog posts, product descriptions, list posts and other content types is possible with them.
Cost – AI content is fast and scalable, costing a fraction per word less than human writers. Monthly payment plans make costs predictable, and tools have them.
Content personalization – AI tools that can save you time by generating personalized content for specific users or buyer personas as a result of data and preferences.
Consistent tone and voice – AI tools use the tone and voice they’ve been trained on by their creators, which is great for brand consistency.

AI Content Cons:

Quality concerns – some AI content is still doing quality things wrong, such as repeating, being irrelevant, shallow and including incorrect facts.
Creative limitations – AI tools are best used for industry-standard content formats such as blog posts, pay stubs or product descriptions. It is hard for them to produce human creativity and ideas.
No research or expert knowledge – Unlike expert human writers in a niche, AI tools have no research experience and certainly aren’t experts in their niche. They are surface-level.
Plagiarism – Sometimes, tools will plagiarize from sites that they index or train on.

Ultimately, copying and pasting a few thousand AI content examples could save you hours or days versus human content creation. However, it has some creative, quality, and voice/tone consistency limits. How do these factors specifically impact SEO, though?

AI Content vs. Human Content for Key SEO Factors

Next, let’s do a side-by-side comparison of human vs. AI content for some of the most important SEO ranking factors algorithms will consider in 2025:

Topic Relevance
Quality Score/EAT
Keyword Usage & Optimization
Backlinks
Multimedia Use
Creativity

#1 – Topic Relevance

Topic relevance is one of the most basic but critical ranking signals – it’s how closely a page or content piece matches the topic of a user’s search query.

AI tools can carefully follow the prompts and guidelines for basic informational queries, so they are focused on high-topic relevance. They may have difficulty with more complex or more ambiguous queries, but. Humans are much better at inferring context, intent and adaptation than they are.

High relevance is also ensured by experienced human writers who know a topic. And they may even increase relevance by being creative in their approach to topics.

Verdict: Slight edge to human writers for complex/ambiguous queries. But AI keeps pace for straightforward informational topics.

#2 – Quality Score & EAT

Google’s quality raters assess pages on expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness – key components of its E-A-T algorithm. How do AI and human content stack up?

AI tools generate related keywords and data points, which is surface-level ‘knowledge’ of a topic. But they don’t have subject matter expertise, and they can’t give you insider perspectives like real professionals. Thus, they are not as authoritative.

The automatically generated content from the major AI vendors is less trusted than that of known expert writers.

For these reasons, human-written content by recognized professionals receives higher E-A-T ratings from raters and algorithms. Brands publishing mainly AI content may struggle with ranking for competitive informational and advice-based queries.

Verdict: Clear win for human expertise and authority for ranking competitively for valuable search queries.

#3 – Keyword Usage & Optimization

When it comes to precisely optimizing content for target keywords and related phrases, AI tools hold their own against human writers.

AI content creators allow granular keyword targeting and content direction. You can specify priority keywords and the exact frequency for inclusion. AI tools ensure keywords are sprinkled in naturally throughout the content.

Similarly, seasoned human writers skillfully optimize around keywords. They may even organically work in more related long-tail variants that AI tools would miss.

Overall, both produce extremely optimized content focused on ranking for core queries. Slight edge to humans for closely related variants.

Verdict: Essential tie – both AI and human writers laser-focused on keyword optimization.

#4 – Backlinks

Gaining backlinks remains one of the best ways to improve domain and content authority to rank higher. Can AI content attract quality links as well as human creators?

Human writers, especially influencers, have a clear edge in this area. Their creativity, unique insights, and expertise make content more link-worthy. Top influencers in a niche can attract dozens of links from fans and publications to their content.

In contrast, the automatically generated nature of most AI content makes it less compelling for other sites to link to. Unless the content offers truly unique stats or data worth citing, it rarely earns external links at scale. So, human-written pages have much greater link-earning potential.

Verdict: A significant advantage to human writers for attracting backlinks is that AI content is less link-worthy.

#5 – Multimedia Use

Search algorithms and users increasingly expect pages to incorporate visuals like images, graphics, videos and other rich media alongside text. Do AI or human creators have an edge here?

Most AI writing tools focus strictly on generating text. They don’t provide images or other visual assets to help illustrate the content. However, some AI platforms allow you to source free-to-use media based on content context automatically.

Experienced human writers and content creators are still far more skilled at finding or creating compelling custom visuals that make topics come alive. The best also incorporate original data visualizations, animations, and videos that captivate audiences and search bots.

Verdict: Humans have a clear edge in creatively illustrating content with impactful multimedia.

#6 – Creativity

Search algorithms continue to evolve toward detecting and rewarding creative, inspired content. For SEO, does AI or human-curated content drive more value through creativity?

Here, humans shine. The innate curiosity, imagination, and knowledge of people create content full of those special “aha!” moments and unique perspectives that engage readers. Fueled by a passion for topics, human originality sparks ideas that are both beautiful and practical.

Meanwhile, AI tools rely on patterns from ingesting and mimicking massive content volumes. As a result, they skillfully reproduce existing ideas but fail to generate creative new ones. While they occasionally surprise, originality is not their forte.

For these reasons, human-fueled creativity holds a significant SEO advantage – the kind algorithms seek to surface. AI content takes a backseat here.

Verdict: A clear victory for human creativity and ideation.

The Verdict: Humans Win for High-Value SEO Overall

Based on these key comparisons, human content edges out AI content for most SEO applications in 2025. While AI tools crank out topics and keywords quickly at scale, they lack the creative spark, expertise, multimedia components, and trust signals to compete with quality human writing.

For basic informational queries with decent search volume, AI content may suffice to grab its share of traffic. However, for valuable rankings where expertise, authority and engagement matter most, human creativity and skill win the day. Brands investing more in AI content than proven writers may hit limits for how far up competitive ladders their content climbs.

Sure, AI will advance continue rapidly. However, based on current capabilities, smart SEO strategies should adopt a “humans first, AI support” model to drive maximum organic growth well into the 2020s.

When AI Content Works Best for SEO

While human content is preferable overall, are there any SEO use cases where AI-generated text does fit the bill? Yes – mainly for supplemental content that requires scale.

Types of AI content that can benefit SEO efforts:

Location pages – Unique landing pages for regions, cities, and neighborhoods to boost local SEO.
Category/taxonomy pages – Auto-generate pages for large product/service catalogs.
Profile pages – Create unique pages for each employee, product, and customer.
List posts – Ranking-focused posts around specific keywords.
Product description copy – Quickly generate descriptions for ecommerce items.
Email newsletters – Scalable templates personalized for each subscriber.

For each, the goal is to create hundreds or thousands of pages/emails that would be infeasible for human teams to handle. AI tools crank these out as long as there’s an accepted trade-off for creativity and conversions.

The key for brands is to recognize where to strategically apply AI content vs. skilled human creators for assets you truly want to promote and convert with. Use AI-generated content as a supplemental ranking and traffic play rather than your flagship destination pages.

The Bottom Line

SEO success requires playing both offense and defense – securing valuable rankings while also filling coverage gaps across topics. Savvy brands use human creativity and expertise to drive conversions and links from their best content while deploying AI tools strategically behind the scenes to strengthen relevance and reach.

AI may one day reach a point where it will close the quality gap to humans even more. For the next few years, at least, SEO managers can rest assured that proven human writing and content creation are the top two ingredients for growing search visibility. AI assistance serves as an additional but crucial element in a comprehensive search optimization plan.

By prioritizing high-impact human ideation while not losing sight of AI scale, SEO success through the late 2020s will be the winning formula. Brands focusing their budgets on the right balance between the two will reap the visibility rewards.

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