Artificial intelligence has made many aspects of digital marketing more accessible. Business owners can use tools like ChatGPT to brainstorm blog topics, write product descriptions, review website copy, and get suggestions for improving their search engine optimization.
For ecommerce businesses managing hundreds of products and collections, this can be particularly appealing. Tasks that previously required hours of manual work can sometimes be completed much faster, and AI can make it easier to understand SEO concepts without needing extensive technical knowledge.
Many business owners and managers are also turning to AI for recommendations about their websites. They might ask ChatGPT to conduct an SEO audit, identify why their rankings have declined, or tell them exactly what they need to do to improve their organic traffic.
There's nothing inherently wrong with this. In fact, we think AI should be part of a modern SEO workflow. The challenge is understanding what these tools can reliably help with and where their limitations begin.
Using AI for SEO can make your marketing more efficient, but the quality of its recommendations depends heavily on the information it has access to and the context you provide.
Here's how to make the most of AI for SEO, along with some important considerations before relying on it to guide your strategy.
What Can AI Actually Help With in SEO?
AI tools can support a surprisingly wide range of SEO tasks, from early research and content planning to analyzing performance data and troubleshooting technical issues. However, there's an important distinction between using AI to help complete a task and asking it to determine what your business should prioritize.
For example, AI can help you write a collection page for your ecommerce store. But deciding whether that collection should exist in the first place requires understanding search demand, competition, your existing website structure, and how customers shop for your products. That distinction is worth keeping in mind as you explore the following applications.
1. Use AI to Brainstorm Content Ideas and Customer Questions
One of the easiest ways to incorporate AI into your SEO workflow is through content brainstorming. You can provide information about your business, target audience, products, and existing content, then ask AI to suggest relevant topics or questions your customers may be researching.
For example, a furniture retailer could ask ChatGPT to identify common questions customers have when choosing between different types of sofas, comparing upholstery materials, or shopping for smaller living spaces.
These suggestions can provide a useful starting point for blog posts, buying guides, FAQs, and other educational content.
Tip: The more specific your prompt, the more useful the suggestions tend to be. Include details about your products, ideal customers, and the questions your team regularly hears.
However, AI-generated ideas aren't the same as keyword research. A topic might sound relevant without having meaningful search demand, or it may overlap with another page on your website. Before investing in new content, we'd still recommend validating opportunities using keyword research tools, reviewing search results, and considering how the content fits into your broader SEO strategy.
2. Speed Up Content Writing Without Losing Your Expertise
AI can be incredibly useful for helping businesses write and improve website content. You might use it to create a first draft of a blog post, organize information into a clearer structure, rewrite confusing sections, or develop product descriptions from existing specifications.
For ecommerce businesses, this can save considerable time, particularly when you're working with a large catalogue.
Imagine you're adding 50 new products to your Shopify store. Providing AI with accurate product details, brand guidelines, and examples of your existing descriptions could help you produce consistent drafts much faster than writing every description from scratch. The important part is reviewing what it produces.
AI doesn't necessarily know what makes your products different, what your customers care about most, or which claims are accurate. It can also produce generic descriptions that sound polished but don't provide much useful information.
We'd recommend treating AI-generated content as a draft that can be improved using your product knowledge, customer experience, and understanding of your brand. The same applies to blogs. Your expertise is often what makes the content worth reading, particularly when you're competing against other websites covering similar topics.
3. Use AI to Organize Keyword Research and SEO Data
AI can be particularly helpful when you're working with large amounts of information. For example, after exporting keyword data from a tool like Semrush or Ahrefs, you could use AI to organize related searches into categories, identify recurring themes, or group keywords by potential search intent.
For an ecommerce retailer, this might help distinguish searches related to broad product categories, specific product types, comparisons, and informational questions.
You can also use AI to help analyze exports from Google Search Console or GA4. Perhaps you want to identify which collection pages experienced the largest declines in organic clicks, compare performance across different product categories, or find pages with increasing impressions but relatively few clicks. AI can help organize the data and highlight patterns worth investigating.
Tip: Provide the actual data rather than asking AI to estimate your website's performance. This gives it something concrete to analyze and makes the results easier to verify.
Keep in mind that identifying a pattern isn't the same as understanding its cause. A decline in organic traffic could be related to rankings, seasonality, changes in search demand, technical issues, or several factors working together. AI can help you identify where to investigate, but determining the appropriate response often requires additional analysis.
4. Get Help Understanding Technical SEO Issues
Technical SEO can be difficult to navigate if you're unfamiliar with concepts like canonical tags, redirects, structured data, crawlability, or indexing. AI can be a useful educational resource when you're trying to understand what an issue means and how it might affect your website.
For example, if Google Search Console reports that certain pages aren't indexed, you could ask ChatGPT to explain the possible reasons and what information you should review next.
You might also provide an export from a website crawling tool and ask AI to organize the issues into categories or explain which ones could have a broader impact. This can make technical SEO information much more approachable.
However, we'd be particularly cautious about implementing technical recommendations without verifying them. A recommendation to change canonical tags, remove pages from the index, or update redirects can have significant consequences if it isn't appropriate for your website.
This is especially relevant for ecommerce stores, where technical settings can affect hundreds or thousands of product and collection URLs through shared templates.
5. Use AI to Review and Improve Existing Content
You don't always need to create new content to improve your SEO. AI can help you review existing pages for clarity, organization, missing information, or opportunities to better address customer questions.
For example, you could provide the copy from a collection page and ask whether it clearly explains the products available, answers common shopping questions, and gives customers enough information to navigate the collection. You could also ask AI to suggest improvements to headings, metadata, or internal linking opportunities based on a list of relevant pages.
This can be a useful way to identify potential improvements, particularly when your website contains content that hasn't been updated in several years. However, be careful about asking AI to rewrite a page solely to improve its rankings.
If the page is already performing well, substantial changes could remove information that helps it rank for valuable searches. Before making major updates, it's worth reviewing the page's current keywords, traffic, and conversions.
Why AI Website Audits Can Be Misleading
This is one of the biggest limitations we think businesses should understand when using AI for SEO. You can ask ChatGPT to review your website and recommend improvements, and it may provide a detailed response that looks very similar to an SEO audit. The problem is that the AI tool may not have reviewed your entire website or accessed the information needed to make those recommendations.
Depending on the tool and its browsing capabilities, it might only retrieve a few publicly accessible pages. It may not crawl every collection, product, blog post, or technical URL on your website.
It also may not have access to important information such as:
- Your Google Search Console data, including actual rankings, impressions, and clicks.
- Your GA4 data, including organic traffic, conversions, and ecommerce revenue.
- Your full website crawl, including redirects, canonical tags, indexing directives, and internal linking.
- Your competitors' search performance and the keywords they're targeting.
- Your business priorities, profit margins, customer behaviour, and previous SEO work.
Without that information, AI may recommend optimizing pages that are already performing well, overlook more important opportunities, or suggest changes that don't align with your business goals.
For example, an AI-generated audit might recommend creating more blog content because your website has relatively few articles. But what if your existing blogs already generate substantial traffic, while your most important product collections struggle to rank?
In that situation, investing in additional blog content may not be the highest priority. You might see a greater return from improving collection pages, addressing technical issues, or strengthening internal linking. A proper SEO audit looks at how these elements work together and uses actual website data to determine where improvements are most likely to have an impact.
AI can absolutely support that process, particularly when paired with specialized tools and experienced analysis. It just shouldn't be assumed that a detailed-looking report is necessarily a comprehensive one.
AI Doesn't Always Have the Right Business Context
Another limitation is that AI recommendations are only as useful as the context behind them. Imagine two ecommerce businesses selling similar products.
One is an established retailer with a strong local presence, a large product catalogue, and a goal of increasing online revenue across Canada.
The other is a newer business with limited brand awareness, a smaller catalogue, and a relatively modest marketing budget. Even if both websites sell furniture, their SEO priorities could look quite different.
The established retailer may benefit from improving existing collection pages, strengthening technical SEO, and expanding visibility for more competitive product searches.
The newer business may need to focus on building a stronger foundation and identifying specific opportunities where it has a realistic chance of competing.
An AI tool might recommend similar tactics for both businesses if it doesn't understand their different starting points. This is also why we wouldn't recommend treating every AI-generated SEO checklist as a list of tasks that must be completed.
Some recommendations may be valuable. Others may be lower priority, unnecessary, or simply not appropriate for your website. A strong SEO strategy involves deciding what to do, what to leave alone, and where your time and budget will have the greatest impact.
When Should You Work With an SEO Expert?
AI can be a great resource for learning about SEO and completing smaller tasks independently. However, there are situations where working with an experienced SEO professional can help you avoid costly mistakes or make more informed decisions.
We'd particularly recommend getting expert guidance when you're:
- Planning a website redesign or migration: Changes to URLs, content, navigation, and technical settings can affect existing organic visibility.
- Experiencing a significant traffic decline: Understanding whether the cause is technical, competitive, seasonal, or related to changes in search behaviour requires careful investigation.
- Making major changes to website structure: Creating, consolidating, or removing collection and service pages can influence how your website ranks.
- Dealing with complex technical SEO issues: Particularly when changes could affect large numbers of URLs.
- Developing a long-term SEO strategy: Prioritizing opportunities requires an understanding of your website, competitors, audience, and business goals.
This doesn't mean you need an agency to handle every SEO task.
Many businesses can use AI to support content development, research, reporting, and smaller website improvements. An SEO professional can then help establish the broader strategy, validate important recommendations, and guide more complex decisions.
In fact, using AI internally can make an SEO partnership more efficient when everyone is working from the same strategy.
Getting the Most Out of AI for SEO
If you're interested in using AI for SEO, we'd encourage you to experiment with it. There are plenty of opportunities to save time, improve workflows, and make SEO information more accessible.
The best place to start is with tasks where you can provide reliable information and review the results yourself. Content brainstorming, writing assistance, keyword organization, metadata drafting, and analyzing exported data are all practical applications.
For more complex recommendations, pay attention to what information the AI tool actually used. Did it review your entire website, or only a few pages? Is it working with current performance data, or making assumptions? Does it understand what your business is trying to accomplish? Those questions can help you determine how much confidence to place in its suggestions.
At Searchlight, we use technology and data to make our SEO work more efficient, but our recommendations are still grounded in understanding each client's website, industry, competitors, and business goals.
AI can help make that work faster. The strategy still needs to make sense for the business behind the website. Looking for guidance on your SEO strategy? Get in touch with Searchlight to learn how we can help you identify the opportunities that matter most for your business.
