The much heralded, world conquering Chatgpt is with us, becoming the ‘fastest growing app in history’. And chatbot-powered search engines from Microsoft and Google have arrived or are shortly to arrive claiming to be the first revolutionary step forward in search for over a decade.
Naturally, we thought it was time to see how far this tech could help us with our day-to-day workload, and more importantly, how much it could benefit our clients.
So what did we find?
Well, surprisingly, chatgpt – so far – doesn’t seem the game changer in online marketing that we’d hoped, nor does it warrant the massive hype.
We couldn’t wait to see if the app could help with our workload. In theory, it should be able to. Maybe in terms of SEO content creation or even with the time consuming task of deep keyword research that always guides our work.
Bottom line, it certainly can’t do keyword research to the level of comprehensiveness that a human can ….yet. The main problem was that the tool couldn’t generate the expansiveness of human created keyword sets without a deluge of prompts that would negate any time saved. Plus there was variance each time in the keyword set. On the plus side it understands and can classify the intent of keywords and cluster them by topics which is indeed a labour saver.
So, many of the tried and trusted, long-handed processes that allow us to put together a comprehensive keyword strategy will still be with us, at least for the time being.
Content generation maybe then?…Nope. Article text seemed recognisably robotic, a soul less style, always without an opinion. And it’s only going to be as accurate as the documents it trained itself on. After all, it is a content predicting machine, generating text on what usually comes next.
That’s not to say it isn’t without obvious use cases. Product descriptions for a large ecommerce site can be done at scale and made original – a challenge many ecommerce sites face due to the labour intensiveness and associated cost of doing this at often huge scale. For example, Wal-Mart have 26,100,000 pages indexed: imagine making each page’s content unique! It should also help with less business critical social and Google My Business posts.
But that’s yer lot for now. So for online marketing, ChatGPt won’t be turning our world upside.
It isn’t changing everything but it may become the go-to swiss army knife for tasks, making some time consuming ones faster and more affordable. However it is clearly no substitute for the centrality of human understanding and creativity in making effective client campaigns.
None of this changes that AI driven bots will generate more useful and chat based answers to our search engine questions.