This article was originally published in ICON/REFINED Magazine Volume 7.

It’s hard to believe ChatGPT was launched just one year ago—it already feels that integral to our lives. And while we’ve asked it to do everything from summarize TL;DR content to create outlines for our projects, we’re still learning where it can help and where it can hinder. 

One place we wanted to know more about its capabilities (and limitations) was search engine optimization, or SEO. So, we asked marketing consultant Jennifer Yamnitz to put ChatGPT to the test to see if it could really stand in for a real-live human marketer. Read on for her findings. 

In recent months, social media platforms have been flooded with posts claiming ChatGPT can help with SEO. As someone with many years of SEO experience, I was intrigued but skeptical. I decided to put ChatGPT to the test, utilizing SEO prompts written by bloggers and media outlets claiming to offer tips on how to use ChatGPT for SEO. 

How ChatGPT Works

Before we dive in, it’s important to understand how ChatGPT and large language models, or LLMs, work. 

ChatGPT is a platform that allows anyone to interact with the GPT 3.5 or GPT 4.0 models of OpenAI’s large language model. Several tech companies have been building LLMs for years, most notably Google, Meta, and Apple. 

Large language models are trained by engineers to interpret and generate human language based on words and phrases in the training data set. To write a sentence, LLMs predict the next logical word to follow the last word based on an analysis of the words used in the training data set. They have no understanding of the actual meaning of words. This is why LLM’s occasionally respond to prompts with false information, which is referred to as a “hallucination.” 

SEO 101

Search engine optimization is the practice of optimizing your website and its content to improve its visibility in search engine results pages. The goal of SEO is to improve a website’s ranking on search engines like Google, thereby increasing organic, or unpaid, traffic to your website. 

When it comes to SEO you are competing against thousands, if not millions, of other websites. For example, the keyword “fitness” appears on more than 12 billion webpages across the internet. That’s some hefty competition to get seen.  

ChatGPT for Keyword Brainstorming

While there are many components of search engine optimization, all SEO strategies start with a keyword or keyword phrase, sometimes referred to as a “long-tail keyword.” For my first tests, I used the following prompt: “Provide me with long-tail, high-volume, low-difficulty keywords for [topic of interest] as if you’re a content marketer.”

In response, ChatGPT was very good at providing a list of potential keywords for SEO, and I can highly recommend it for idea generation. However, that’s where ChatGPT’s utility as an SEO tool begins and ends.  

“When I tested ChatGPT’s keyword lists in an industry leading SEO platform, the results showed that the keywords had little or no search volume.”

The Problem: Strategic Keywords

Although the prompt I gave ChatGPT specified “long-tail, high-volume, low-difficulty keywords,” when I tested ChatGPT’s keyword lists in an industry leading SEO platform, the results showed that the keywords had little or no search volume. If you were to trust ChatGPT and create content around a keyword with no search traffic, no one would be searching for that information. As a result, no one would visit your site—an SEO fail.

Competitive SEO Analysis

An effective SEO strategy is built upon understanding the domain authority of a website, search volume for a keyword, and how many websites are competing for that keyword. On follow-up tests, I tried prompts specifically aimed at generating information about competitors and search volume to see if there was another way of wording a prompt that would provide better results.

Unfortunately, ChatGPT repeatedly gave the following response: “I’m sorry, but I don’t have real-time access to external websites or databases to gather specific keyword data, such as search volume and competition…”

One of the prompts that I tested was, “I need a table of the top competitors for fitness photography and their URLs curated by a keyword strategist.” In response, ChatGPT did provide a list of fitness photographers and URLs, but also included the following warning: “I can’t provide real-time data or access the internet for live information as my browsing capability is disabled and my knowledge was last updated in September 2021.”

The Verdict

Without real-time data, ChatGPT can’t provide much of the information needed to assist with SEO, and the hype around ChatGPT as an SEO tool is misleading at best. At least for now, it’s best to continue using an established SEO platform for strategic content development.