Why You Shouldn’t Ask an AI Platform for SEO Advice

Imagine sliding your dentist a ChatGPT guide on root canals right before your appointment. Awkward, right? The same principle applies (just with lower stakes) when giving SEO advice to someone who does it for a living. 

As digital marketers with years of experience in local and national SEO, part of our job is continuing education and experimentation. So you can imagine how intrigued we were when AI platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini rolled out to the masses. Naturally, we jumped right in to learn how to use them efficiently and effectively.

And it wasn’t just us! We quickly discovered that clients were just as intrigued by AI as we were, often turning to these platforms for digital marketing advice. On the surface, that may seem both helpful and harmless. However, there are several reasons why turning to AI for SEO advice can ultimately be a waste of time. 

AI Platforms Have Issues… Lots of ‘Em

One of the most glaring issues with AI platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude is that they hallucinate and provide you with false information. That’s because they’re trained on the open web, which, for lack of a better term, can be a dumpster fire.

Nowadays, everyone is an expert — or at least they pretend to be, publishing content without having to prove its accuracy. So if you ask ChatGPT for advice on how to rank better in traditional search engines or how to achieve ultimate AI visibility, chances are it’s pulling information from at least one faulty source.​

Cutting Through AI Slop

AI slop is a term we use to describe low-level, often fictitious content, either written by AI or created solely to appear in AI search results. The problem? People blindly believe what they read online.

Lily Ray, a highly trusted marketer and someone who’s been outspoken about the dark side of AI, published “The AI Slop Loop” in April 2026. When she asked Perplexity for the latest SEO and AI search news, she was given details about a supposed September 2025 Perspective Core Algorithm Update. That information was false. There was never an update by that name. To confirm this, see Google’s official Search Status Dashboard for a list of recent core updates.

Wondering where Perplexity got that information from? A fictitious AI slop blog published on an SEO agency’s website. Perplexity picked it up because, again, anyone and everyone can claim to be an expert in 2026, and there aren’t any guardrails set up to prevent someone from publishing false information and gaining visibility from it. Yet.

​AI Answers Vary from Person to Person

Another issue with accepting SEO and AI visibility advice from an AI platform is that visibility is highly volatile. The answers can vary greatly depending on your conversation history with the platform and your location (for local searches). Because of this, it’s difficult to get an accurate understanding of your current visibility, which can cause business owners to panic.

It’s easy to be tempted to turn to ChatGPT and ask for audits or seek SEO advice. However, rather than risk getting faulty or incorrect information, turn to your real-life account manager. They’re already focused on what you can do to encourage these platforms to include your business in their results — earning trust signals — and can offer advice based on your strategy as a whole.

You May Not Be Giving Them The Whole Picture​

The outputs you get from an AI platform are only as good as the prompts you give it. 

For example, our team recently received a client email with two attachments full of SEO and PPC keyword suggestions. Based on the font, structure, use of emojis, and findings, we can tell they asked ChatGPT to analyze their business and provide digital marketing advice. 

The output wasn’t necessarily bad. The problem was that it offered advice without considering what’s currently being done. 

Because what Chat and other AI platforms fail to understand is the “why.” They don’t take into account years of client-account manager communication or the deep understanding of who their ideal customer is, which can explain why something is or isn’t being implemented.

In this instance, rather than asking Chat to analyze the site’s current keywords and compare them with competitors’ to identify missed opportunities, the client received a list of keywords and phrases already used in the metadata and naturally within the page copy. 

For PPC specifically, there was a list of keywords to incorporate in the Ads campaign, as well as negative keywords to exclude. Again, Chat can’t account for the keywords we’re already targeting and excluding.  

Our PPC account managers have years’ worth of keywords that get sorted into different campaigns, ad groups, and ads. Those decisions are all based on historical data, real-time observation, and conversations with the client. 

So instead of providing the client (or us) any useful information, Chat essentially gave us a pat on the back and reinforced what we’re already doing. ​

What to Do Instead of Asking AI for Advice

Check in with your account manager. We do our absolute best to keep our clients in the know of the work we’re doing. Our account managers are always available via email and phone/video call, and we send monthly reports that not only detail each month’s completed work but also use the data to show how that work has impacted their business.

So when a client sends us “professional” advice from ChatGPT, it tells us we need to do a better job of letting that client know what’s going on. Because we recognize that the foundational SEO work we’ve been doing for years still has a profound impact on both search and AI results.

When AI Is Helpful for SEO

Despite their issues, AI platforms can be highly valuable when used thoughtfully, and they do have a place in our ongoing SEO strategy. Some of the ways our team uses these platforms include:

• Content Development. A well-crafted, thorough prompt can speed up the content development process by helping create outlines, product descriptions, structured markup, and more.
• Keyword Research. We use industry-standard SEO tools to identify high-quality keywords that drive qualified traffic and conversions, and we can use AI platforms to take our research a step further. The platforms generate keyword variations and phrases, identify recurring themes on a page, and more.
• Competitor Analysis. When analyzing competitors, it helps to get a general understanding of what they are doing from a marketing perspective, and AI platforms can quickly generate an overview for you. Using the tool, we can review their metadata, blog routine, topic list, etc., and identify content gaps between their websites and our clients.
• Link Building. Ask any SEO or digital marketer what the hardest part of their job is, and you’re bound to get a few link building answers. That’s because the links that actually matter (ie, high-quality, hyperlocal, and a natural fit) are either hard to come by or costly. And while AI platforms can’t negotiate the price of an industry-specific business directory for you, they can help identify which ones are worth pursuing.

Put Your Trust in SEOM

You don’t have to stop using AI, but you do have to realize that the answers you’re receiving aren’t always accurate.

When it comes to any new technology, our philosophy is to be curious and open to experimentation, while recognizing that the latest is not always the greatest. And though our team will continue to incorporate AI into our workflows, we’ll never use it without human oversight or let it replace the personal relationships we’ve built with our clients.

As we all move forward, we hope that you’ll trust us to guide you in improving your digital marketing strategy, rather than the chatbot that once suggested adding non-toxic glue to pizza sauce to prevent cheese from sliding off the pizza. Yes, that really happened.

Ready to talk to a real-life team member about how our strategies can help your business stand out in an AI world?