Can ChatGPT Replace Human Content Writers in SEO Copywriting? An Empirical Comparison for Performance Measurement of Generative AI in Search Engine Optimization in E-Commerce

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) can be used in a variety of ways in marketing and sales. The automated creation of texts, as enabled by ChatGPT, offers great potential in search engine optimization (SEO). However, there are critical discussions going on whether SEO texts created with AI pose a risk to a website’s ranking by search engines like Google. Therefore, this chapter investigates how pages perform in terms of ranking when they contain ChatGPT-generated texts. Over a period of eight weeks, the ranking of 60 pages with 60 texts – 30 written by ChatGPT and 30 by human authors – is recorded on Google. The results show that both ChatGPT-generated and human-written texts have a significantly positive impact on a ranking. Furthermore, text generation with ChatGPT shows a potential saving of time of over 90 %. The chapter shows the massive potential ChatGPT offers in terms of SEO and cannot confirm concerns that ChatGPT-generated texts negatively influence the ranking.