AI and SEO: What We Found When We Tried to Measure the Impact on Content Volumes

Remember when content marketing was about standing out? Create content that aligns with high user interest and intent and you’ve got a lead magnet.

That ship has sailed—and now there’s a fleet of AI dinghies trailing behind it. Generative tools make it easier than ever to flood the internet with copy. But here’s the question we set out to answer: Will the ease with which AI tools make copywriting faster produce a content tsunami?

Are marketers creating more content in an effort to quickly capitalize on perceived opportunity? Or are marketers—concerned about the emergence of agentic search and the flooding of content marketing—stepping back from a traditional emphasis on content creation? Is AI really changing the shape of SEO and marketing—or is it just creating noise?

This isn’t another “AI is changing everything” puff piece. It’s a reality check. I tried to measure the presumed tsunami of AI-influenced content, to see if it had actually changed anything that matters to marketers.

Spoiler: It didn’t go as planned.

Conventional Wisdom: What the Marketing World Thinks AI Is Doing to SEO

The conventional wisdom goes like this: ChatGPT, Jasper, Claude, and their robot friends have unleashed a tidal wave of new content. More blogs. More landing pages. More topical authority. Marketers are pressing “publish” like it’s a reflex.

Meanwhile, engagement is tanking. Organic clicks are drying up. Search results are full of AI-powered answers that don’t even lead to websites anymore.

So I asked myself: Is there a measurable relationship between AI-generated content and organic marketing volume and engagement? If so:

• There should be more content than ever.
• That content should be getting harder to rank, harder to click, and harder to care about.
• There might be unintended consequences, such as content being created for long-tail keywords that were previously ignored.

I tried to prove it. I really tried. I failed, but learned a few things along the way.

How I Tried to Measure Content Growth

It’s not easy to measure content growth at scale. I explored:

• Screaming Frog crawls to detect URL growth.
• Search for year mentions (“2023”, “2024”, “2025”) in content bodies.
• Structured data (like datePublished) for publish dates.
• SEMrush Top Pages exports.
• Google search operators (e.g. intext:).
• Sitemap lastmod tags.
• Considered tracking referring domain velocity to infer content traction, but ruled it out early—it was too noisy and hard to isolate from unrelated link spikes.

Here’s why none of those worked reliably:

• Date mentions: Mostly footer or cookie-script related.
• Structured data: Inconsistently used—even by major publishers.
• Search operators: Truncated or unreliable counts.
• Sitemaps: Often fake or missing lastmod.
• Backlink velocity: Too noisy; skewed by PR and brand spikes.

The bottom line: the modern web no longer leaves a trail.

What the Crawl Data Showed

Wanna see the raw data? >> Click here.

The Real Problem: We Can’t See the Impact of AI on Content Anymore

This isn’t just an SEO issue. It’s an existential dilemma for online content.

Content is currency. But we’re minting it in the dark. AI has enabled mass production—but stripped away visibility. No timestamps, no trails, no way to trace who’s creating what, or when.

We went looking for a flood. But got lost in fog.

What Smart Marketers Should Do

• Get weird. Publish what only you can write.
• Structure everything: Schema, headings, internal links. Search engine based AI platforms such as Gemini will still rely on many of the SEO-related best practices, at least for the immediate future.
• Target link-worthy content. Stop chasing crumbs.
• Clarify your brand. Become a future AI citation. AI-powered assistants and search engines increasingly favor clear, consistent, and well-structured brands when surfacing or citing information—so make sure your expertise, messaging, and authority are unmistakably yours.
• Track your own velocity and performance internally. Analyze, analyze, analyze.
• Write for humans, but enable the robots.

This isn’t about content volume. It’s about signal clarity.

Conclusion: What AI and SEO Really Means in 2025

I tried to measure a content flood. Instead, I found that everything—metrics, tracking, transparency—is eroding.

Maybe *that’s* what AI is changing. Not just volume, but visibility itself.

Write content worth finding—and structured enough to be found.

Search engines don’t search anymore. They answer. And if your content isn’t answer-worthy, it’s already invisible.

FAQ: AI and SEO in 2025

Is AI-generated content hurting SEO?
Not directly. But mass-produced junk content makes standing out harder. Quality and structure matter more than ever.

Can AI help SEO?
Yes—if used wisely. AI can help research, ideate, and draft. But humans must refine, optimize, and ensure credibility.

Why is measuring content velocity hard?
Because sites don’t timestamp or tag consistently. Tools can’t reliably detect when content is created or changed.

What’s zero-click search?
When search engines (or Gemini/SGE) answer without linking out. It kills organic traffic unless your site is the answer.

Should I still invest in SEO?
Yes—just differently. Build structured, useful content that earns mentions from humans and machines.