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SEO agency overusing AI
Posted by on December 10, 2025 at 5:33 pmI need to rant and to ask the advice of SEO experts in case I am overreacting!
I work for a Salas company and we recently started working with an SEO agency. They are doing some schema fixes and 30 content optimizations a month (we have an active blog with fairly good rankings).
They have said they use AI and seemed to have a solid workfloe, but I just checked the first three optimizations and I am at a loss for words:
Article 1 – This is on a topic very close to our product, but they have removed references to our product and features and made it very generic. Weird but ok. TOV is off, but fine. Then they recommend a competitor.
Article 2 – Topic is feedback process. There are six references to biology (diabetes, blood clotting, urine, the pancreas) including in the FAQ section – clearly they have a client in the biology industry and their AI is cross pollinating
Article 3 – TOV is better, but they left the AI response in the article in a section that has obviously been copied and pasted without any checks
I seem to be the only one in my team that thinks this is a big deal and worried that we're going to replace good, human-written, researched articles with AI slop (30 a month will mean almost every article will get this treatment).
I know there are probably algorithm reasons, but the quality is so much worse and the tactic seems to be add more words.
Any experienced SEO folks here that can either put my mind at ease or validate that this will hurt our SEO performance in the long run? My understanding was that Google doesn't value very clearly AI generated content. Would fewer quality optimizations not be a better long-term tactic or am I getting this wrong?
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1 Reply
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There is no algorithmic benefit to replacing good content with AI slop.
Google crawlers cannot, and don’t even try, to determine what is AI written content. You won’t get any kind of “AI penalty”.
If the quality of their work is this obviously poor on content, I would be worried about other aspects of work they are doing. Especially off page.
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Article 2 is a massive red flag. Id be ticked off. Leaving ai artifact is sloppy.
I just turned off my ‘memories’ bc of insane levels of gaslighting and pollination.
AI can do 99% of the work. To not put in the 1% human effort is a poor long term desicion. Lazy.
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Fire them. Immediately. You aren’t overreacting, you’re the only one watching the house while it burns down.
The “biology” references in a feedback article are the smoking gun. It means they are likely using a single ChatGPT thread or a poorly configured API wrapper for multiple clients and didn’t clear the context window before generating your “optimizations.” That is amateur hour level negligence.
And Article 3? Leaving the AI prompt/response in the text is the classic sign of a “churn and burn” agency. They are selling you a deliverable (30 articles/month) to justify a retainer, not actual SEO strategy.
The biggest risk here isn’t just that the new content won’t rank—it’s that they are overwriting *currently ranking* human content with unedited AI slop. Google’s recent updates (especially the HCU and core updates) have been hammering sites for exactly this kind of low-effort, scaled content.
You are paying them to de-optimize your site. Pause the contract before they nuke your existing traffic.
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The issue with AI correcting content is, that it doesn’t necessarily understand the context, since it wasn’t tought a specific context. So it corrects things and drops passages it doesn’t know.
A good agency would use AI and then use human eyes to check and correct. Your company doesn’t seem to do that and it is sloppy.
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The craziest AI articles have the subheading “Conclusion”. 😆
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It is not an overreaction at all. What you describe is a clear sign of poor QA and a weak content process. Any good SEO agency would treat your existing content as an asset. They would protect brand tone, product relevance and factual accuracy. What they delivered shows they are running bulk AI prompts with little or no review.
Here is what is going wrong from an SEO point of view:
Removing product context harms topical authority as if an article ranks because it is linked to your product and your niche, stripping that out can weaken relevance. Google reads your pages in context of your whole site. Going generic can dilute that.Recommending a competitor is a huge red flag as no strong workflow should allow that through. It shows no one is doing a final read. Even basic editors would catch this.
The biology references show they are using one prompt template for many clients with no guardrails. Google does not punish AI itself, but people will punish poor quality content that is wrong, irrelevant, misleading or unhelpful. They will pogo stick to the next result below yours… This type of mistake is a trust killer.
AI is fine when it is well edited and provides real value. It fails when it is lazy, hallucinated or stuffed with filler. What you describe is the type of content update that can cause traffic drops.
More words are not an SEO tactic, Google rewards clarity and usefulness. You get no gain from padding an article. In many cases you hurt the page because users bounce.
Your fear about scale is valid as If they do 30 of these a month, you can end up with a site wide quality issue that is then time consuming to fix. Site quality is judged at the domain level. A flood of poor updates can drag down sections of your site that already perform well, either by reducing conversions or people pogo sticking.
What a good agency would do instead is to keep your tone of voice, add missing sections based on search intent, improve structure, update facts, strengthen internal linking, remove fluff, not add it, only use AI as a support tool, not as the final output.
You are right to question this. Fewer high quality optimisations are always better than many low quality rewrites.
If this is the first batch, I would stop them now and ask for a new workflow. If they cannot explain their process in plain language and show human QA steps, I would move on.
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You’re not overreacting. Replacing good, human-written articles with generic, AI-generated content will hurt your SEO in the long run.
Google’s recent updates reward depth, originality, and clear expertise. Low-quality AI rewrites, especially ones that get facts wrong, lose your product focus, or cross-pollinate unrelated topics are a recipe for ranking drops and loss of trust.
Quantity doesn’t beat quality. It’s better to do fewer, high-quality optimizations that keep your brand voice and product focus than to churn out 30 weak updates a month.
Bring this up with your team, show examples of the mistakes and explain the risks. If your agency can’t deliver quality, it’s time to push back or find someone who can.
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Oh for the love of… everything about that agency is a dumpster fire.
You’re not overreacting at all.
I see this constantly and it’s absolutely ridiculous.
AI isn’t supposed to do all of the work. It’s supposed to be leverage to help gain better data and insights in a faster manner.
Anything else is just taking the easy way out
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If the quality is bad, then just tell the agency to STOP, that the content is unacceptable, and must now go through you to get approved before it goes public/live.
There’s no “algorithm benefit” to providing AI generated slop, in fact it’s ruining your brand and company image if anything.
Sounds like the “SEO agency” is just being lazy and cheap, not even paying someone to review and edit the content they produce.
110 percent you need to push back on this.
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>Article 1 – This is on a topic very close to our product, but they have removed references to our product and features and made it very generic. Weird but ok. TOV is off, but fine. **Then they recommend a competitor.**
You don’t need more than this
>I know there are probably algorithm reasons, but the quality is so much worse and the tactic seems to be add more words.
Probably not – Google doesnt’ know everything – actually, it doesnt seem to know very much. I’m currently using my SEO blog to challenge SEO myths and I rank for saying the opposite of others (so there’s the consensus = accuracy myth, which is an absolutely terrible logical fallacy)
>Any experienced SEO folks here that can either put my mind at ease or validate that this will hurt our SEO performance
Directly – not really but publishing incorrect information esp in healthcare (this doesnt make your site YMYL necessarily)
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My understanding was that Google doesn’t value very clearly AI generated content.
Google welcomes AI content with open arms
[Google Search’s Guidance on Generative AI Content on Your Website | Google Search Central | Documentation | Google for Developers](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/using-gen-ai-content)
> Would fewer quality optimizations not be a better long-term tactic or am I getting this wrong?
It depends where you are – if you need to build topical authority, then more pages – but pages dont have to have a certain word count (and any attempts here would be random/arbitrary)
But you can also increase topical authority with things like glossaries, FAQs,
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Bad is bad. Trust your gut.
One common AI-generated SEO tactic is generalizing the titles and descriptions. In actuality, that is throwing away ranking keywords. Don’t do that.
That alone is enough to warrant stopping them, aside from the article recommending a competitor 😂
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The algorithm will pick up nonsense and punish you for it sooner than later. Lock them out from your website ASAP or they likely will do more damage than good based on your examples given.
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They’re probably subcontracting people from Fiverr. I don’t advise you to do this, but if you do, you’ll get the exact same horrible results, but 10, 20, or whatever times cheaper.
If I were you, I’d cut ties immediately and demand a reimbursement. Not only have they failed to provide the service you’re paying for, but they are actively harming your site, which will be much more difficult and expensive to recover.
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I’m not an seo expert by any means, nor could I tell you if it would hurt your rankings. But I couldn’t cope with having things like ai prompts left in articles. I used ai to create bits of copy for my site, but always checked it and reworded things that sound ‘ai’.
From a business point of view, that’s the least you’d expect from an agency, fair enough use ai, but there needs to be some sort of quality control
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They should be editing and fact-checking.
They are not. They will promise to do so, but they won’t.
Fire them.
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