Your Digital Marketing Coach with Neal Schaffer

Is AI Content Hurting Your Google Rankings? Insights from Originality.ai’s Jon Gillham

• Neal Schaffer • Episode 401

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This episode dives into the pressing issue of AI's role in content marketing and its implications for search engine rankings. We discuss the risks of over-reliance on AI while emphasizing the importance of maintaining quality, originality, and a human touch in content creation. 

• Exploring the balance between AI efficiency and content quality 
• Google’s stance on AI content and implications for rankings 
• The role of Originalityai in ensuring high-quality content 
• Recent trends in AI-generated content and their consequences 
• Future directions for AI in content marketing and editorial integrity

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Speaker 1:

AI is changing content marketing, but how much AI is too much? Can AI-generated content hurt your search engine rankings and how do you ensure the content you publish is high-quality, original and optimized for success? In this episode, I sit down with John Gillum, co-founder of Originalityai, to discuss the risks and realities of AI content, google's stance on AI-generated content and the best ways to ensure your content stays competitive. So stay tuned to this next episode of the your Digital Marketing Coach podcast.

Speaker 2:

Digital social media content, influencer marketing, blogging, podcasting, vlogging, tiktok, linkedin, twitter, facebook, instagram, youtube, seo, sem blogging TikTok, linkedin, twitter, facebook, Instagram, youtube, seo, sem, ppc, email marketing. There's a lot to cover. Whether you're a marketing professional, entrepreneur or business owner, you need someone you can rely on for expert advice. Good thing you've got Neil on your side, because Neil Schafer is your digital marketing coach helping you grow your business with digital-first marketing, one episode at a time.

Speaker 1:

This is your digital marketing coach and this is Neil Schafer. Hey everybody, this is your digital marketing coach, neil Schafer. Tactical advice on digital marketing to get some nugget, some insight, some actionable advice that you can leverage in your business today. That is what this podcast is all about, so thank you for joining me Now.

Speaker 1:

We all know that AI continues to revolutionize content marketing, but, as they say, with great power comes great responsibility. Google has made it clear that low quality, mass-produced AI content won't cut it. But where do you draw the line? How do you balance efficiency with originality? Pun intended, in this episode, I talk with John Gillum, co-founder of originalityai.

Speaker 1:

Many of you know it as an AI detection tool. It's actually a lot more than that, but it is a tool designed to help businesses detect AI-generated content, but also check for plagiarism and, in doing so, improve the quality of your content. We dive deep into how AI content is affecting search rankings, google's latest updates including that helpful content update that I talk a lot about on this podcast and what steps businesses should take to ensure their content stands out for the right reasons. Whether you're a business owner, a marketer or content creator, understanding how AI is shaping the digital landscape is crucial for staying ahead, so let's break it all down and figure out how to work with AI intelligently without getting penalized by Google. Without further ado, here is my interview with John Gillum.

Speaker 2:

You're listening to your Digital Marketing Coach. This is Neil Schaefer.

Speaker 1:

Hey everybody, thank you for tuning in to another live stream edition of the your Digital Marketing Coach podcast. Ai content, google these are the trifecta of technologies, of companies that, as marketers, as entrepreneurs and business owners, we really need to understand. How much is enough, how much is too much, should we even be using AI at all in terms of our content, and what effects does it have on our Google search results as well as other search engine algorithms? I can think of no one else to talk about this topic with than the founder of one of the leading, if not the leading, ai detection tool, originalityai, a tool that I use with my own guest bloggers to detect AI content and I highly recommend you check out today. But regardless, we're going to talk all about these risks and really, how do we live together with AI, because it is becoming almost a permanent part of society. So, without further ado, I'm going to introduce to you the founder of OriginalLadyai, john Gillum, or co-founder. I always get that wrong, john, but either way, welcome.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, thanks, Neil. Thanks for having me Happy to talk about this stuff.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, really excited to dig in, John. I always ask my guests before we dig in. Obviously, AI. Well, AI has been around for decades, but generative AI is relatively new. So what brought you into doing what you're doing at originalityai? What did you do before that?

Speaker 3:

Have you always been involved in AI or high tech, or have you always been involved in AI or high tech or yeah, no more heavily involved in content marketing? So sort of the source of sort of getting into the space was I was, yeah, deep into the world of content marketing for a number of years, sort of started that journey in sort of 2008, 2009 timing and then I've been, yeah, heavily, heavily involved in that space since launched a content marketing agency, had sold it at one point was the heaviest users of Jasper, predating ChatGPT, and then we had seen this sort of wave of generative AI coming and didn't have the right controls in our agency to be able to know when we were or were not using AI.

Speaker 1:

Got it so curious. Were you at Jasper's generative AI conference in early 2020? No, I wasn't. Okay, I was there. I thought I might have seen you there. So, so cool. So you come from the world that most, if not all, of my listeners are very familiar with content marketing using jasper, which I have also used in the past, and both the the revelation that, wow, this can really change things, but, on the other hand, well, should we really pursue you know this much AI in our content? What have you? So? What brought you from there? So you were at an agency, so you really did. You develop originalityai from that content marketing agency, then saying, hey, we really need to put some control over this.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, well, so we had sold the agency and then had seen the and sort of in there in that, along that process, I was then looking at sort of what to do next and I had a portfolio of websites, had some other sort of businesses on the go that are again all sort of around that sort of like marketing world and specifically content marketing world, and then had seen this sort of. Yeah, there was a very clear need for both a modern plagiarism checker you know, I think a lot of people have used Copyscape. It's got some problems when you're trying to use it at scale and so, trying to create a modern plagiarism checker, modern content quality QAQC tool and then AI checking was a piece of that, but only going to be one piece of it.

Speaker 1:

And then, when we launched, the weekend before ChachiPT launched, and then, sort of, you know, the world changes as it relates to the need for, or in the sort of interest in, generative AI. At that point, gotcha, that makes a lot of sense. So just I guess it was the perfect timing, the perfect storm.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I mean I wish it was a little earlier, but I mean it's like still better than after.

Speaker 1:

Well, that answers my question as to why there was also this plagiarism checker checkbox whenever I do a check originalityai so when you started out, then you know plagiarism checker, also AI checker and then ChachiBT. Are there particular industries or types of companies that you found drawn to your tool because they have a more urgent need when it comes to, you know, for instance, regulated industries or what have you? Do you see any trends or do you see just general interest in in your tool?

Speaker 3:

So we've seen a ton of general interest and we don't love that, like we. So who we're building for are people that are working as a copy editor. So basically, you know you, when you, when you're receiving guest posts, like you described, you're operating as a copy editor Does this piece of text meet my standards? And we look at AI, plagiarism, readability, grammar and spelling, fact checking, and so those are all tools that we've built into Originality because we're building it for somebody that functions as a copy editor. So anybody that's publishing content on the web, that's who we're building it for. That's who we see has the sort of a big need, because the risk to their businesses is very, very high and the sort of efficiency of doing a check is also very high.

Speaker 3:

With originality, where we've seen a lot of interest is from some other industries that aren't always as great a fit Academia. We have tons of users from academia I can imagine Don't love that use case within academia. They're highly accurate but not perfect, and within academia, when there's academic disciplinary action on the line, you need perfection, you need sort of certainty of proof, and we just can't produce that. No, no detector can produce that?

Speaker 1:

And that was going to be my question Can any detector? I have a son in high school who has been. You know the schools all use a technology called turn it in. Yeah, and just you know he's. He's already gotten pinged by that when. I believe it was and I trust my son I believe it was a false positive. So I know, you know, using originalityai, I used to usea different tool which just flagged everything as AI, even content that I personally wrote right, even without using a grammarly. So it is interesting. So would you say then, when you talk about originallyai and we're going to go into the whole what Google says about AI and all that that we plan to, but would you say that you, you know what originallyai is AI detection tool but it's a lot more and it's really about supporting the content creation in the marketing departments of enterprises. Would that be a better way to describe how you put your company now?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I mean so AI detection is the thing that the majority of users have come to us for and we are sort of the most accurate, especially on sort of web content that we've been built for. But, yeah, we view ourselves as a complete AI assistant, a complete assistant for anybody publishing content on the web. So, exactly as you described, we want to get to the point where it becomes irresponsible to publish content without having it run through originality and making sure that it sort of meets your requirements. We want to be at a point where, even if you're okay with using AI and you know it's going to get identified as AI, but you don't want it to be plagiarized, you don't want to be factually incorrect and you want sort of the right readability range. We want it, in the end, to be sort of like, yeah, that final check for every piece of content that gets published on the web.

Speaker 1:

Well, that's great to know. I actually religiously use Copyscape for all of my writers, so I will definitely be checking out. I just didn't see originalityai in that light right, I always thought of AI detection, but it's really about improving the quality of that output that you publish in the web. So, with that in mind, google AI you know we had the helpful content update. We've had sort of spam updates. A lot of websites, including my own, even though I don't use I don't think I use AI content has gotten hit. So what are you seeing as a developer of this technology of you know? Let's set the record straight of what Google is saying about the use of AI content the record straight of what Google is saying about the use of AI content.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so I think there's a lot of dogs in this fight around sort of like trying to interpret what Google says and like, hey, do we believe Google? I mean, that's a dangerous game to play as well, of sort of believing everything that they say versus what we see. So I'll try and I mean certainly I probably have my own bias coming at this from sort of thinking that AI matters. What Google has said is that at first they said we don't want, we don't want spam, we're okay. However, that spam is created, we don't want it. We want content created for humans.

Speaker 3:

The sort of the mental exercise that I sort of like to think through this in is if Google search results were filled with nothing but AI, why would anyone go to Google? Why wouldn't they just go to the AI? And so it's an existential threat to Google. If their search results get overrun by nothing but AI, that's probably going to kill them. But on the flip side, so why don't they say that?

Speaker 3:

And then, on the flip side of that is they need to be this AI forward company because they're facing this sort of their Kodak moment.

Speaker 3:

Where are they going to get totally disrupted and killed by a technology that they invented, and I think that that's why they had their red alert. That's what significantly scares them. And so they need to be this sort of ai forward company but at the same time, not let their search results get overrun by nothing but ai, because then no one would use google anymore. So I think that's that's sort of what google has said is like, hey, we don't want, and then we can get into the sort of the data that we've seen to sort of support what they've said. But what they've said is like we don't spam. You mean, we want content created for humans that add value, not for search engines. And then the sort of the context of what they've said is that they face this existential threat if their search results get filled with nothing but AI, and they have to be this AI forward company because that's what where the world is going.

Speaker 1:

So would you say then and this is sort of the conclusion that I've come to, and just look reading between the lines of like helpful content, update, provide your own personal experience that they don't really care if it's AI generated or not, but they want content that is personal, based on experience, things that AI can't or is very, very difficult for AI to do. At the end of the day, if they have a happy user, then they are happy as well. Would you say that's true or would you challenge that right now?

Speaker 3:

I think I would still challenge it in that I think anything that comes close to the point where somebody can press a button and it publish content and they add no value is, if that is the machine, that there's. No, I don't believe there's any path to sort of like creating the optimal prompt that generates content en masse, that adds value, that is a sustainable opportunity to get traffic from Google. I think there's like some programmatic plays with unique data, but in terms of like hey, here's this prompt with a little bit of enrichment and a little bit of rag and this now adds a lot of value, I think that's. I don't believe that is a strategy that has any sustainability to it.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, no, I agree 100% and in fact it's funny, john, I saw a webinar that Jasper did of how they use Jasper in their marketing and they lean heavily on AI, not in the actual creation, but in the ideation of creating content briefs for writers, what have you? So it is this coexistence, right, yeah, but yeah, I know that there are companies out there that are promoting one click and I know that maybe some sites at the beginning are successful with that strategy. But you know, google does come around, they make their rounds, they do their checks and I don't know I'm sure you'd agree, I don't know if that's a long-term solution or not yeah, no, I, I, I fully, fully agree and yeah, I would.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, some very clear data that Google has come out and like this sort of this, like I'd say, there's like two zones. There's a spectrum on like human to AI and then and then cyborg. It's very clear that, like on mass published AI spam, google hates that. There's no I'd say there's no uncertainty. The data has supported that. They've communicated it and that's what we've sort of consistently seen, yeah, so let's dig a little bit deeper.

Speaker 1:

You mentioned you have data, and one of the things I know you wanted to talk about was the amount of AI in Google search results. So what are you know? What are you seeing right now? Is it already inundated with AI? Has Google been able to keep AI out? What's the current status from your perspective?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so we're running a study where we're looking at search results, historical search results and the amount of AI in those results, by sort of looking at the Wayback Machine when it's not being hacked so challenging right now, but we might have to take a month off of that data but we're looking at the amount of AI in Google search results and then graphing that over time, and so what we've seen is this sort of two 2018, sort of like 3% range, which sort of falls in line with our false positive range, and then that's been growing and then growing at an accelerating rate up to about 14% right now. So 14% of the web is AI generated. Again, not all not all AI is spam, but all sort of spam in 2024 has likely been AI generated. So that's what we're seeing right now.

Speaker 3:

And then, in terms of sort of what we're seeing from how Google has attacked AI content, the March 2024 update, march 4th manual actions, were I kind of think of it as like a psyops update, where they did this massive marketing push around the update and 40% of spam content is going to be gone overnight, and then they did this manual action across a ton of sites 2% of all sites that were on any of the popular ad platforms like Ezoic, mediavine, raptive, 2% of them were all manually de-indexed on the eve of the start of that update rollout. The majority of those sites that have been de-indexed, the majority of their content was AI generated. When we dug deep into that, into the sites that had been de-indexed, what was common amongst them and it was very clearly mass published, ai generated content was what Google had attacked, and so it's like they are. So they won that battle but might be losing the war in terms of AI getting into their search results.

Speaker 1:

Well, yeah, that was my question. So that 14% going up from 3%, I'm assuming, even though with the helpful content update, with the anti-spam updates, it's still at 14%, then Is that a correct assumption?

Speaker 3:

content update with the anti-spam updates, it's still at 14%. Then Is that a correct assumption?

Speaker 1:

It's still at 14% and been increasing, had some blips where it came down, but it's on a pretty consistent march up, yeah. Now, when you look at how you define that AI content, is it that content that appears in the search results has and I know that you have like a zero to 100% meter on originalityai. Is it like above, you know, 50% or what's sort of the point that you take to consider it being AI generated?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so the way to think and this is kind of one of those sort of so many of us have used Copyscape or other plagiarism detectors for years and so we're trying to sort of apply that same scoring mechanism to AI. And I tried to as well and it was challenging. But the way detectors work, they're sort of a family of machine learning called a classifier, and that provides a prediction on is it likely AI or likely human, and then the percentage is a confidence score, and so the way to interpret it is if it says it's 55% AI, then it says I think it's AI, but I'm only like 55% confident. So I'm not very confident. But I'm saying that I think AI was heavily involved in the creation of this content and I'm 55% confident. Not that 55% of it is AI, 45% of it is human Gotcha.

Speaker 1:

So if I guess let's look at this a few different ways. I know that there are some companies out there, despite my advice, that just hit that you know, generate content with AI and they publish it. What is your recommendation for companies that realize that they might be considered part of this AI spam, even if they haven't gotten a hit before? Do you have any recommendation for them on what they can do to help mitigate potential risks of already having published AI content?

Speaker 3:

Having already published it. If it's working and your site's not super valuable to you otherwise, then ride it right. Just know it's going to crash, right, you know. I think you know, having been sort of in the world of SEO and content marketing since you know, 2010, 2008, timing it's. It's like we know there are temporary arbitrage opportunities with Google. Mass publishing AI content sometimes produces those opportunities. It usually doesn't end well, and so I would say there are different businesses. There are some sites that I have that I test AI content because I'm trying to fully understand this world.

Speaker 3:

But there was sort of the viral tweet called like the SEO heist tweet, where they were the individuals working as a content marketing agency, essentially for a real company, for like a software business massively grew their traffic and then went, went to zero, so basically killed, killed the organic traffic to that business by using an aggressive strategy. So my, my advice to anyone that's publishing content is to whether they're using AI or not, is to understand those risks and then make a heads up decision on whether or not you want to be using AI or not, and not leave that to a writers or a marketing agency. But the publisher should be the one that is accepting that risk because they genuinely are. The agency might have gotten paid for a piece of that content, but didn't live with the risk, and so that's what I'd say. So if they really care about the site, rip out the AI content. If they don't care about the site but it's working from a traffic standpoint, ride it but expect a crash.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, really, really good advice. So you already mentioned what Google does to sites that it considers generating AI spam in terms of de-indexing, and we know that for those that are relatively new to SEO, you might not see it, but I compare it to being a stock investor and seeing a few crashes over the years. You sort of see that the markets do even themselves out and I do believe the search engines do as well, right? So, based on that, if there is a business owner, entrepreneur, listening, that has outsourced content creation or that has had guest bloggers, how do they go about determining the risks of that content, of having AI, of maybe having too much AI? That may be just having a little here and there, as long as it's really helpful and it includes personal experiences, okay.

Speaker 1:

But obviously I'm assuming you're going to recommend a tool like originalityai. But even with that tool, you mentioned that there's no 100% certainty. It's based on probability. So how would you go about if you were the owner of a company that was outsourcing content creation to a content marketing agency? How would of a company that was outsourcing content creation to a content marketing agency? How would you go?

Speaker 3:

about using your own tool.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so we have a tool I believe we're the only one that has it, but it's a site scan feature and so you can load a site in and it will scan.

Speaker 3:

It will crawl all the pages and then provide a score on likely AI or likely human for every article that's on that site, and then you can see that by author, by publishing date, and then you can get a sense for how much content has been published on your site up to that point and then you can decide what to do. Is it specific authors? If we were to run that on our own site, we do have some content that is AI assisted, especially from some of our research team where they're English as a second language individuals wickedly smart, but they're using AI to sort of assist in that content creation. So what I would do is use the site scan feature to understand the risk and then work with the agency to understand what their policies and controls are in place and be very scared of anyone that says our writers don't use AI. And then it's like how do you know?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and I guess even using something like Grammarly is AI-assisted right, whether we like it or not.

Speaker 3:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

So tell me a little bit more about SiteScan. I think I've seen it on the site, I don't think I've used it before. So someone opens it and comes up with originalityai. And I'm just thinking about my own site. I have 750 blog posts, multiple authors, so on WordPress. So is it able, just by a scan it's going to go through and by author by post it's going to give me that report, correct? And I guess my other question then is how much time, like for a 750 blog website, is this like a 24 hour thing? Is it immediate or you know, walk us through sort of the process and what the output looks like.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so two, two options. One option is not yet available, will be available in probably a week or two, but the the so the current option is yeah, go into the site scan feature of originality, enter your URL. You can control a few options on how many posts that you want scanned. Do you want sort of a random 100, recent 100, or do you want all 750 scanned? It then you know you, click start gives you an estimate for the cost.

Speaker 3:

Click start, it will go out and scan that content. Timing to do 750, assuming kind of 1,000 words per post be under 15 minutes, not sitting there, scroll and done. So it'll take a bit of time but but yeah, probably under 15 minutes to complete sort of scrape, all the content, scan all the content and then provide an analysis. The second option you mentioned is on WordPress. But we have a WordPress plugin that's coming out very shortly that will scraping can produce some inefficiencies in terms of the content, whereas sort of the within the of WordPress it can be a lot cleaner and so you can get. So we have a WordPress plugin that can achieve some very similar results in terms of scan all posts, filter on an author, scan all those authors posts, et cetera.

Speaker 1:

Will the WordPress plugin allow you to also do that by category?

Speaker 3:

Yes, Basically any filtering mechanism that exists within WordPress posts or pages. However, you can filter in there. You can then select the post and then scan those posts.

Speaker 1:

And then the output of that is going to be obviously it's going to be a lot of data by post, by aggregation, by author, category, date. Maybe Is it going to be average probability or confidence that AI was included. Is there any additional information that's being provided?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so it's the. The scoring is always the same where it's likely AI or likely original, and then the confidence score, and so it'll say likely AI, 99%, confident, or it'll say, like the original, a hundred percent confident. So that's likely AI, like the original. And then the confidence. And then within the, the WordPress book doesn't have quite as much reporting, but within the SiteScan app you have a lot of ability to filter and look at graphs over time, of kind of really understand how sort of AI has been infiltrating your site, potentially without your knowledge, if you haven't had controls in place.

Speaker 1:

So we talked about that poppy scape, which is plagiarism. We talked about the AI detection. One thing we didn't talk about, which I think your tool also provides, is a fact-checking capability. I'd like to learn more about that, because I see, even with guest bloggers, they will source statistics without giving the source of that statistic right. Or a fun one to do is ask ChatGPT for case studies of something, and it will bring up fictitious case studies that just don't exist when you do research. So I'm curious as to how that functionality works, and is this also part of the site scan or not as well?

Speaker 3:

Yes, not part of the site scan but, yeah, standalone feature when you're doing a content scan. So the primary sort of feature that people use the tool for is they get a piece of content from somebody. They then need to make sure that content meets certain standards. They put it into the content scanning app with an originality and they choose what scans they're going to run on that piece of content AI, plagiarism, fact checking, readability, grammar, spelling, etc. On the fact checking app, we call it a fact checking eight. So we would love it to be accurate enough to be called like a fact-checker, like the source of truth.

Speaker 3:

But it's an LLM powered app as well and it is prone to its own hallucinations.

Speaker 3:

But what it does is it offers as an aid to help an editor fact-check far more efficiently, and so it will identify all facts, which it does quite accurately.

Speaker 3:

It will then understand the context of the article, go out, do a deep search on the web to try and identify what the sort of the common truth is about that piece of information and then provide an answer as to what it believes is factually accurate or not and then provide a truthfulness score and then provide sources to go and dig deeper, provide a truthfulness score and then provide sources to go and dig deeper, and so again, we call it sort of an aid. But it ends up with sort of a article that has every fact highlighted green to red in terms of the confidence that it's factually accurate or not accurate, and then a bunch of helpful resources to go and verify whether that statement is actually true or not. Go and and verify whether that's that statement is actually true or not. Very accurate. But it's like 85 accurate, not nearly high enough to be like fact-checking green done. I don't need to. It doesn't.

Speaker 1:

It doesn't absolve the editor of their fact-checking job yet right, but if there was, like I said, data that was sourced with no link from a guest blogger, it would be able to see that there was a fact there, give it a green or red light and then provide a source. So if I wanted to check it and find that source of that link, it would actually provide me that information. Is that correct?

Speaker 3:

Exactly Exactly. The process that you described is what editors need to do when they're fact checking and and the tool is built to make that process as as efficient as possible for them and it does exactly exactly what you said. It will provide link and then some, it can provide some pretty magical sort of comments where, like, the boiling point of water is 80 degrees celsius, it's like, well, that's wrong. But if the context of the article is that boiling point of water at a certain elevation, on a hike, in whatever camp at Everest, and then it will say, okay, here's the elevation of that camp, here's the boiling point of water at that elevation, that therefore, boiling point of water being 80 degrees Celsius, might actually be true.

Speaker 1:

Right, okay, very cool. So I think hopefully the listeners and viewers can see how using it's almost like AI for good. Right, it's using AI to improve the quality of your content. And, john, I just I wanted to end and I wanted to ask you where originally ai and where you think AI is going from here.

Speaker 1:

Necessarily about the AI which really permeates everything we do, but it's more about, well, if the AI content detector detects it as smelling like it's heavily AI written, it's going to be poor quality, that is not going to resonate with readers because it sounds robotic, and that's the conclusion I've come to and that's why I'm still a fan of AI detection tools. For that reason, is it human sounding right? And I think that we are now getting used to seeing more and more AI generated content to the point where, if I see a paragraph that starts with in these days of something comma, I know it came from chat, gpt, right, and I think we're all getting in tune to that. So, at the end of the day, do you find a lot of people, a lot of businesses, are leveraging AI detection in that way of saying it's just a part of quality control now, or are people still, religiously, we need to. You know, anything that's over, you know, even if it's a 10% confidence, we need to revise it.

Speaker 1:

Where do you see this now? And then, you know, going forward. Where do you see this going?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so wide spectrum of some people operating off of a hard number. Because that's, you know, that's how we've worked in sort of the world of content marketing where it's like plagiarism scan of X, plagiarism score of X, readability score here you know, content optimization score above this threshold, and so sort of a clean score. Integrating into that workflow is so seamless that there's still people that want to do that and I understand why. So we see a lot of people still doing that. It's not our favorite use case. I think the optimal use case is that it's editor and a writer relationship and the AI score is used to help ensure that there is maintains a human in the loop for every piece of content that is being published and that the quality stays high. And if there is an AI score above 50% so the likely AI then that editor and writer can work together.

Speaker 3:

We have a free Chrome extension that takes all the character by character creation history of a Google document and visualizes that writing process, and so it's meant as a sort of it's a free tool, but meant as if there's ever a potential false positive. The editor and the writer, teacher and student can go in and look at that creation process and then really understand what was done in the creation of that document. So I think there's gonna be more. My hope is that it's gonna be a continued sort of progress towards the use of detection tools are to help people understand was a human involved in that creation process and or was it? Was it sort of one click and copying and pasted to chat gpt in seven seconds? And you know, I think a lot of people are happy to pay a writer a hundred dollars, thousand dollars, but if the rate may might be not very happy to have it copied and pasted there to chat GPT in seven seconds.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, indeed. So, would you say. Then we're sort of moving from a world of AI is evil we need to detect AI content and rid it of our systems completely to a world of quality control, of understanding holistically where the content's coming from and just using tools like originalityai, just as another way of controlling the quality of that content in light of the use of AI Is. That sort of the world we're at now and then you know where do you see this going and where do you see originalityai going in the next several months, a year or two?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so some are and, for reasons that may be valid or may not be valid, are sort of taking a stance of no way on my on my site period. My writers are not allowed to use ai at all, ever full stop, and they might have business reasons different than ours that pushes them to that outcome. And so we do have some people that are saying no ai period and are holding holding a strong line using detection tools. Most people are moving to the kind of the world that I think think we sort of are both talking about, where it's a, it's used as part of an overall quality quality control step, but it's only one of multiple signals, and that's the direction that originality is heading as well is continuing to build out features that help editors do their job. And so what do editors and copy editors need to do? Ai or not?

Speaker 3:

Plagiarism, fact checking, readability scores, grammar and spelling, editorial guideline compliance. So how close does this article line up with the editorial guidelines for our site and is this article going to perform well in the search results? And those are some features that are coming down, that are currently under development, that I'm pretty excited about, sort of how we're approaching those problems in the world of publishing content and so again, sort of the end state is it'd be crazy to publish content and not have run it through originality to sort of make sure it meets your standards, make sure it's going to comply with your guidelines and make sure it's going to perform as well as possible in search results.

Speaker 1:

Well, very cool. I'm looking forward to that because I think this, when you talk about make sure it's compliant to editorial guidelines, that'd be very cool to, because we know it's capable, with AI, of having this concept of a tone or a brand voice and making sure that the content written is actually aligned with that, compliant with that, and that'd be very cool too. I don't know of any other tool that has that right now. You know ChatGPD has. Well, what tone would you like me to take? What have you? But, from a large enterprise brand perspective, being able to do the quality check of that tone, of that voice would be very cool, so really excited.

Speaker 1:

And yeah, you know, in all honesty, john, before this interview, I thought of originallyai as another one of those AI detection tools. But obviously that content marketing background I can see how marketers, you know, should very much be interested in what you're developing and I'm definitely going to check out that site scan and get the tips from my own website. So, john, just to close off, anything that you wanted to talk about vis-a-vis AI content, google content quality that we didn't talk about I want to give you the floor. But also, for those that are interested, what should be their next steps if they want to check out originalityai.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, no, I think we covered everything really well. Kind of great fun, fun chat. Yeah, if they want to check out originalityai, head over to originalityai with free feature or free tool for almost each one of our features that we've talked about, and then, if you have any questions for myself, you can reach me at jon at originalityai or find me on LinkedIn. Well, or find me on LinkedIn.

Speaker 1:

Well, there you go. Very cool, john. Thank you for your openness. Thank you for sharing sort of you know. A lot of people don't know what they don't know and they only know about AI what they see in the media. But, hearing it from a company that's developed AI detection tools, I think this has been invaluable. I'll definitely be checking out Original AI. Being a Copyscape user myself, I can see I'm only getting a part of the picture when it comes to quality control my own content. So, very cool. Thank you so much, john, and I hope you all enjoyed this episode. Feel free to reach out to John and, hey, I'd love to hear where you are in terms of AI detection. So reach out to John, reach out to myself. Love to hear from you. Let's keep this conversation going, because it really is a critically important conversation going forward, john, thanks once again and I hope to keep in touch. Awesome.

Speaker 3:

Thanks.

Speaker 1:

Neil, I really hope you enjoyed the interview. There aren't that many people that I can bring in who, with some sort of authority because they have a tool and they've been testing these things and seeing the results can really give us this really solid advice on AI-generated content and search engine rankings what have you? It's something we all have to deal with, and hey, and search engine rankings what have you? It's something we all have to deal with. And hey, if you are looking for more help with your AI marketing or content marketing or blogging or social media or any of that anything that we discuss in this podcast I cover weekly in my Zoom calls in my Digital First group coaching community. We also have a Facebook group, but really it's the weekly calls which help hold you accountable, get your questions answered and always learn a few things from what other entrepreneurs, startups, business owners are tackling. It is really the best way that I can help you, above and beyond this podcast.

Speaker 1:

So, if that interests you, by the way, everybody who is a member, every 90 days they get a free one-on-one 30-minute coaching call with myself as well. The investment is less than $100 a month. Check it out, go to neilschafercom, slash membership and that's it. Thank you again for joining me on this journey, which continues, and if you ever thought we'd run out of topics to talk about vis-a-vis digital marketing man, there is so much to talk about. I already have interviews lined up for the next well, six months really. So lots of good stuff to come. Make sure you hit that subscribe button, stay tuned. And that's it for another hopefully you agree exciting episode of your Digital Marketing Coach podcast. This is your Digital Marketing Coach, neil Schafer, signing off.

Speaker 2:

You've been listening to your digital marketing coach. Questions, comments, requests, links. Go to podcastnealschaefercom. Get the show notes to this and 200 plus podcast episodes at nealschaefercom to tap into the 400 plus blog posts that Neal has published to support your business. While you're there, check out Neil's digital first group coaching membership community If you or your business needs a little helping hand. See you next time on your digital marketing coach.