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Ahrefs: AI Content wasn’t good enough, now it is – Are they right?
Posted by on March 17, 2026 at 3:04 amIt’s a common belief that AI-generated blog posts are inherently low-quality and inferior to their human-made equivalents.
Companies that scale AI-generated content do so with the knowledge that they are making a trade-off, we believe, choosing speed and scale at the expense of quality. We agree that AI is faster than any human, and it makes a passing first draft, but we know we are still sacrificing something important by using it.
I now think this belief is outdated. I think we have reached the point where generative AI can create content indistinguishable from the vast corpus of human-written content produced by content marketers, like me, in previous years.
Source: https://ahrefs.com/blog/ai-content-wasnt-good-enough-now-it-is/
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1 Reply
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It’s now to the point where there’s very few human writers on this earth that can do better than Claude opus.
It needs to be managed and verified correctly as it still has hallucinations, but as far as research, writing, etc.
I honestly don’t see the point of even trying to write anything manually anymore.. or ever code one single line ever again. -
I think it’s “good enough” for the average SERP, not actually better.
If you look at a lot of ranking pages, they were never that high quality to begin with. So AI matching that level isn’t that impressive, it just means the baseline was low.
Where it still struggles is differentiation. Most AI content clusters around the same structure and wording, so it’s fine until you’re in a competitive SERP where everyone’s doing the same thing. That’s where it starts flattening out.
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Until hallucinations start appearing less you’ll still need that human overlook
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100%
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For some content it is good enough. You don’t need a writer to put together an article that describes why water is wet. How to tie a pair of shoes. A synthesized article is sufficient for the essentials. But something that benefits from the insight or testimony of an actual professional? LLMs will always be insufficient on its own. It can’t test the TVs. It can’t speak to the focus group of patients or customers. It holds no degrees. It can’t create a new insight.
In fact, it’s not even correct to call it AI. It isn’t AI. We don’t have AI. These are language models. The difference and your understanding of that difference matters. And the simple tea leaves (GIST) will tell you that having the same answers any other site can post with a prompt will get lost in the sea of the same. The content that can add a perspective that brings new insight? Unique insight? Well that has value. But you kinda have to know what the fuck you’re talking about and you have to have the experience to add it.
People will eventually find out that you can’t fake or short cut actual experience. And it will be the reason some content gets promoted the most and the rest ends up as chaff. Same as it always was, but even more clear. Painfully for many.
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The big problem I have with this notion is that AI can only create content based upon what it already knows.
The one thing that is always unique about any content on a web site is how that content specifically relates to your brand. If you’ve never described that relationship to your brand, the AI can never adequately create content that describes that. It can’t create a sales funnel that generates leads and leaves the brand impression you want unless you tell it.
Now… if you take the time to tell it all that, then sure. And it may be able to take one page of good human created created content and turn that into 5 or 6 pages of good AI generated content. But if you’re not giving it new angles on things, the only thing you can get is stuff it already knows… so why would it want to index it again and rank or surface it?
G.
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