• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, January 30, 2023

Artificial intelligence (AI), deep learning and automation have become critical for marketers who want to stay ahead of market trends, consumer preferences, and competitive shifts in the market.  

“ChatGPT is bringing AI to the consumer,” says BrightEdge Chief Executive Officer Jim Yu. “The impact of AI to users and marketers are similar, taking AI and applying it to applications that let people converse with it.”

Search engines, including Google and Microsoft, will integrate the technology into their respective engines.

For example, Baidu, the leading Chinese search engine, during the weekend announced plans to launch an AI chatbot service in March, similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT. The technology will launch as a stand-alone application and slowly integrate into the Baidu search engine.

Yu mentioned that A stands for assist and I for inform, which makes it easier to understand how AI will change advertising and marketing.

AI in search is not new, and has been a foundation for search-engine optimization for years.

BrightEdge already has some components of GPT in its platform Autopilot.

In Autopilot we have been using GPT-3, a powerful language model, and in some cases to help fine tune natural language tasks," Yu said. "ChatGPT, a variant of the model, used for Chatbot creation, is being looked into to help in platform use cases."

Yu said ChatGPT, a language-generation model developed by OpenAI, is having its moment because consumers can interact and converse with it in a concrete way. Google has been making search more conversational, leveraging keywords in answers.

The outcome -- conversational keywords -- appears in questions used as queries in search engines such as how to “find the best restaurant in the city” based on a specific location.

“The ChatGPT interface lets you refine that conversation, ask it to narrow it down and refine the answer,” Yu says. “That’s how AI will evolve in the way people interact with search.”

Yu says he asked the bot to group items together, or to find something less expensive compared with his initial query. Not only do you have the intent-based keyword, but the conversation to give it additional context to converse with it.

BrightEdge saw this potential five years ago and incorporated conversational keywords in the platform. ChatGPT is now helping marketers see the value.

Today, the technology is text-based, but it’s easy to see how the technology will eventually transition to voice-based.

BrightEdge research from December 2022 shows AI benefits such as content and efficiency are top properties for marketers in 2023. The company has been on a journey to become an AI-first company for more than 14 years. 

The technology has been integrated into the BrightEdge Platform to power search, content, and digital marketing solutions.

For example, BrightEdge Autopilot has been deployed already to thousands of large enterprises to help large organizations identify and perform SEO tasks that d ont need a human touch.

From digital market insights and data-led insights, content creation and SEO task reduction and automation improved productivity and cost efficiency make the use of AI an attractive alternative for marketers. 

Yu believes the industry will see large amounts of machine-generated content on the web, but a machine cannot replace the art of human storytelling and emotional connection. He says:

• The best content writers align business objectives and messages to the needs and want of the user (the searcher).  
• AI assists, especially with ideation, copyediting, grammar, and spelling.  
• It can also help with formatting and research (with limitations).  
• Human supervision will always be needed at the front and end of content production processes. 

He said experiment with AI-generated content, but do not risk compromising SEO positioning and traffic on untested strategies, especially those using AI-generated content that could fail Google's standards--based on limitations and factual inaccuracies. 

• Google will look for spam and nonfactual content that contains inaccuracies and has no human perspective. 
• Don't produce content that is written just for search ranking. (HCU) 
• It will accelerate search engine innovation. 
• AI shows the potential to make search engine optimization much faster and more efficient if used, integrated, and supervised correctly. 
• AI will not replace humans.

This is especially true when writing thought leadership and opinion pieces. It may be okay for blog posts with human supervision, but it’s still debatable how much it really saves in terms of resources if quality and accuracy are the end goal, Yu says.