How AI Transformed The SEO Writing Gig

Anyone who’s used the web lately has encountered no shortage of search engine-optimized articles with titles like “How to Find a Bed for Back Pain” or “Best Pizza in St. Louis.” They’re typically written with headlines designed to match common Google searches and interspersed with other keywords likely to appear in queries, all with the intention of showing up high in search results. 

Writing this type of content — which appears on corporate blogs interested in bringing in traffic to matching products and on sites heavy with third-party advertising — isn’t necessarily glamorous, but it’s historically been a steady source of income for many freelance writers, helping them pay the bills and often effectively subsidizing their work on other projects.

But since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, writers have seen work dry up as clients switch from hiring humans to draft copy from scratch to using generative AI tools to write the same material, perhaps with a touch up by a human editor before it’s posted.

“There’s just less work right now for writers as a whole,” said Meredith Tannor, policy director at Freelancers Union.  

In a recent survey Freelancers Union conducted about the effects of AI, more than half of about 300 respondents said they’ve seen fewer work opportunities or clients as a result of the technology, she said. A research paper originally published in 2023 found that a leading freelancing platform displayed 21% fewer job posts “for automation-prone jobs related to writing and coding,” compared to less automatable jobs like office management and audiovisual work, within eight months of ChatGPT’s launch. 

Those writers who do find work can end up forced to accept lower rates, since they’re competing with dirt-cheap chatbots — one social media post from an investor and finance YouTuber in 2023 boasted of replacing three part-time writers, who he collectively paid over $3,000 per month, with a 62-cent OpenAI bill — and with the other writers who’ve been displaced by them. 

There are also ominous signs for non-freelance workers.