14 Ways to Use AI for Better, Faster SEO

With those ideas lodged in your brain, let’s look at how you can use AI tools for faster, better SEO.

Pick a starting topic and ask AI to suggest related keywords: sub-topics, questions, similar concepts, you name it.

Take your list of ideas, plug them into a keyword research tool like Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer, and you can quickly see the estimated traffic potential and Keyword Difficulty for each of these terms:

Not all of these seed keywords will have meaningful volume, but that’s okay. Switch to the Matching terms or Related terms tabs, and you’ll see hundreds more related keywords that do:

You can even skip the ChatGPT part entirely and use the built-in AI suggestion feature in Keywords Explorer:

Here, our AI copilot has brainstormed “subtopics and niche areas” related to our core topic, content strategy:

Analyze SERP intent

This can be useful for working out which type of content you need to create to match the dominant intent (do searchers want an informational guide, or a free tool?).

In the example below, I copy/pasted page titles from the SERP for the keyword “LLM” and asked ChatGPT to categorize them by the different intent types present:

After a little cajoling and refining, ChatGPT grouped the titles into a few different categories, like definitional (explaining what an LLM is) and comparative (comparing different types of AI ******):

You can take this process to the next level with the Identify intents feature in Ahrefs. For your given keyword, scroll to the SERP overview report, and hit the “Identify intents” button:

This has the benefit of also showing you the percentage of total estimated traffic each intent receives.

In this example, with 82% of traffic, it makes sense to target the keyword “llm” with a definitional article about LLMs, and ignore the lower traffic intent associated with LLM degree programs.

Brainstorm titles and headers

Here, I’ve pasted the content of my latest blog post into ChatGPT and asked it to suggest title ideas:

I generally don’t use these ideas verbatim, but ChatGPT regularly generates words or phrases that make their way into my finished titles.

You can also use our free blog post title generator in the same way. Just describe your topic, choose the writing tone, and hit “generate”:

You can modify and create new ideas at the click of a button:

Check grammar

…and a moment later, AI has flagged two possible issues for me to resolve:

Edit transcripts

In either case, you can use AI to tidy up and correctly format transcripts, making it much easier to pull out quotes and ideas.

In this example, I’ve asked ChatGPT to correct a free (and error-prone) transcript from a YouTube video:

And here’s the edited version, complete with correctly capitalized brand names, removed typos, and grammatically correct punctuation:

Add missing topics

One way to improve search content’s performance is to ensure that it includes important information that the searcher needs. Common sense can be a useful guide, asking yourself “which topics am I missing?”—but AI can help automate the process too.

Ahrefs’ new experimental Content Grader tool uses AI to automatically analyze the top-ranking articles for a particular keyword, identify the topics present, and score them according to how well they cover the topic.

Content Grader can even explain how you should address the topic gap, and share an example from another top-ranking article:

Write meta descriptions

If you want to generate lots of meta descriptions without sinking tons of time into the process, AI is pretty perfect. Here’s our free AI meta description generator: just describe the contents of your page, choose a writing tone and the number of variations you’d like, and hit generate.

And here are the outputs:

Here, I’ve asked for recipe schema for a chicken soup recipe. With a couple of tweaks (like adding in the recipe author), I could add this to my page and become eligible for rich results (and most likely more clicks):

Generate hreflang

Of all the AI/SEO use cases I’ve covered, these are probably my favorite.

Constructing regex queries

Regular expressions (or regex) allow you to search within text and data for patterns that are otherwise difficult to spot. They can be pretty complicated, but AI is extremely good at writing and troubleshooting very complex queries for you.

And here it’s helping me filter a spreadsheet of URLs by their crawl depth:

And here it’s written a query to use with Ahrefs Site Audit to help me filter out localized content (pages that have country codes, like /de/ for Germany, somewhere in their URL):

Making Google Sheets formula

SEOs spend a lot of time in spreadsheets, often wrangling lots of data with complicated formulas. ChatGPT can make this process much, much easier.

It’s also great for troubleshooting when things go wrong:

Writing Python scripts

Python is a popular language for automating SEO processes. Generative AI is pretty darn handy at writing and troubleshooting Python code, and I’ve used it to help speed up some of my SEO processes.

Here, I asked AI to create a basic web scraper for storing data from a given webpage:

And here I asked for help writing a script to call the Ahrefs API and collect bulk traffic and backlink data for a list of websites:

And yes—both of these scripts worked!

For longer explanations (and the prompts used to make these visualizations), check out Patrick’s article:

Here’s a graph of organic traffic over time, with traffic anomalies (usually Google updates) highlighted:

Here’s a plot comparing desktop and mobile rankings for a selection of keywords:

And here’s a chart showing seasonal patterns in backlink acquisition:

AI can help you do SEO, but it’s also changing the industry as a whole. There are lots of myths circulating about the impact of AI. Let’s address the biggest, head-on.

It doesn’t look like it.

Maybe.

Theoretically, yes.