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How To Handle Clients Insisting On Using AI To Write All Content, After Agreeing On Human Writers
Posted by on March 29, 2026 at 11:33 pmI'll start out by saying I'm not against AI content on its face, I do believe high quality content is necessary and how its achieved is less important.
At my agency we don't produce the content, we only work with companies large enough to have dedicated content teams. So its not like I have a financial inventive to see them use my human writers or anything. We also discussed the use of AI in the process and agreed upon using human writers before we started any work.
I deliver the first brief for the first main piece of content, and they're like "we want to use AI to write all of this".
This isn't my first time encountering this, I walk them through a deck and my counter proposal is to start with human writers so we can establish a baseline set of human content that we can later test some AI content against. Also since they're new to SEO, learning the process so they can better instruct AI in the process later on.
Then I get the suspiciously non-nonchalant email with a article that is clearly AI written and barley follows the content brief, often edging into other topics that could lead into cannibalization because AIs tend to kitchen sink topics, missing some keywords, no headings, dull copy, zero hook, lack of focus, nothing that helps with EEAT etc etc.
I've had this happen to me in the past, the traffic predictably fails to materialize, and we part ways because they're unhappy with the finger pointed at me. I'd really like to have a different outcome for this (obviously) but long story short, I need to keep this client.
Any advice would be much appreciated.
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1 Reply
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I recently have been having this issue when signing new clients. Its like they come into a meeting TELLING me how to do SEO because AI told them whats needed and how much they should pay for it. Ugh.
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