AI didn’t kill your SEO. Your low-quality content did
I’m so tired of seeing “AI is killing SEO” or “programmatic SEO is ruining the internet” takes on LinkedIn.
The truth? SEO has been flooded with garbage content forever and it’s never been about the tool you use to create it. It’s about whether that content is actually useful to your audience. That’s it.
You could kill your SEO with a random Fiverr content farm long before GPTs existed. You could kill it by writing thousands of words that say absolutely nothing. You could kill it with clickbait, fluff, or irrelevant garbage. You can still kill it with a team of five writers if none of them thought about the user once.
AI or programmatic SEO isn’t the problem. The problem is lazy content.
Look at Zapier
Take Zapier. They’ve built one of the best examples of programmatic SEO at scale. Their integration pages are simple, clean, and relevant. A user searching for “Notion to Slack automation” finds exactly what they need, fast. The content is programmatically generated, but it answers the user’s question. That’s the whole point.
Zapier doing programmatic right.
Pages like the example above are simple, programmatically generated pages. They follow the same format. But they work because they answer a real question. Someone Googles “connect HubSpot and Trello”? Boom, Zapier page. Done. Useful.
It’s not about whether content is “AI-generated” or not. It’s about whether it solves the user’s problem.
Let’s compare two AI-generated pages
Bad Example:
You prompt AI: “Write a blog post about best CRMs for startups.”
You get:
CRMs are essential tools. Startups can grow with them. Salesforce is a CRM. HubSpot is also a CRM. Here are 10 CRMs.
It’s just filler. No use cases, no comparisons, no opinions. You can smell the zero effort.
Good Example:
Use AI to:
- Pull real customer reviews
- Highlight comparisons with use cases
- Group options by price, startup stage, or region
- Structure the post to show insights fast
Now it’s valuable. Now it ranks.
Want programmatic SEO ideas that actually work?
Here are real examples of what you can build with AI + programmatic:
Use case pages:
“Accounting software for freelancers in Finland”
“Best CRM for SaaS startups under 10 employees”
→ Each of these could be generated from structured data, matched with real search queries.
FAQ pages:
Pull your customer support logs, group by theme, generate helpful FAQ pages programmatically.
→ “How to reset password,” “Invoice not received,” “Cancel subscription”
Template directories:
If you sell to marketers, devs, HR—whatever—build a bank of downloadable templates:
“SaaS product launch email template,” “LinkedIn job ad for backend engineer,” etc.
Comparison pages:
“X vs Y” content that includes actual specs, pros/cons, and tailored recommendations.
Localized landing pages:
“AI workshops in Helsinki,” “Startup jobs in Tampere”
→ Works if you’re covering different cities or languages, especially in Nordic markets.
These all scale with programmatic and AI. But the key is still the same:
You need to care whether the content is actually useful.
What doesn’t work?
- Filling your blog with 200 variations of “Why productivity is important”
- Publishing GPT output without editing or formatting
- Using content as decoration instead of answering real questions
AI content doesn’t get you penalized. Bad content does.
If your SEO tanked after adding AI content, that’s on you. Same way it would’ve tanked if you paid €50 per post to some random ghostwriter who doesn’t know your audience.
Google or ChatGPT doesn’t care if a human or a machine wrote it. It cares if a human finds it useful.
So next time you hear someone say, “AI killed our SEO,” ask:
Did AI kill it - or did you just ship crap at scale?
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