Let me tell you something that nobody selling you a cheap content package wants you to know. There is no magic bullet.

There never has been. Not in marketing, not in business and certainly not in getting customers through your door. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you something, and what they're selling you probably isn't worth what you paid for it.

So let's talk about AI content. Specifically, let's talk about whether flooding your website with it is going to transform your business. Because a lot of people have been told it will, and a lot of people have been lied to.

"But I got all green lights in Yoast..."

Yes, you probably did. And that's a bit like passing a driving test in a car park and thinking you're ready for the motorway.

Tools like Yoast and RankMath are checklists. Useful checklists, mind you: they tell you whether you've ticked certain boxes. Is your keyword in the title? Is your meta description the right length? Have you used enough subheadings? Tick, tick, tick. All green.

Here's what those tools do not do: they do not talk to Google. They do not feed into Google's indexing of your website. They are not a hotline to the algorithm. Getting a green light in Yoast tells you that your content meets a set of criteria that a plugin has decided matters. It tells you precisely nothing about whether Google will rank you, whether people will read what you've written, or whether anyone who does read it will pick up the phone.

So, if someone sold you a content service on the basis that it would get you green lights, now you know what those green lights are worth.

What does Google actually think of AI content?

Google is not stupid, it has spent an enormous amount of money becoming very good at spotting content that was produced quickly, cheaply and without any real thought. The bland, repetitive, says-nothing prose that pours out of an AI prompt like "write me 500 words about accountancy services": Google has seen it a million times.

And here's something worth thinking about. Google runs its own large language model - Gemini. How do you suppose these models get smarter? They learn from the content that exists on the internet. Good content makes them better and thin, recycled, AI-generated slop makes them worse. Google has a very strong commercial incentive to reward quality and penalise rubbish, and that is exactly what it does.

When you fill your website with cheap AI content, you are not just failing to help yourself, you may actively be penalised for it.

Have you been sold magic beans?

Jack's mother threw them out of the window. You might want to do the same.

Running a small business is hard work. Anyone who has done it knows this and there is no purchase you can make, no tool you can subscribe to and no package you can buy that will suddenly make customers appear. If it were that simple, everyone would do it and it would stop working immediately.

The magic bean merchants are everywhere. They speak fluently about ROI and KPIs and content strategies and organic reach. They will sell you volume: hundreds of pages, thousands of words, because volume sounds impressive and is easy to produce. What they will not give you is the one thing that actually brings customers in: something worth reading, written by someone who understands your business and your customers.

What do your customers actually want?

Here is something that should be obvious but apparently isn't.

When someone is looking for a service business such as an accountant, a solicitor, a plumber, a consultant, anyone who is going to come into their life and their business and do something important: they are not looking for a website, they are looking for a person.

They want to read something online and think “yes, that sounds like someone I'd trust”. Someone who knows what they're talking about. Someone who, when I meet them or speak to them on the phone, will sound exactly the same as they did when I read their website.

What they do not want is to read the same fifteen sentences that appear on every other website in your industry, rearranged slightly, with your logo at the top.

And here is the contradiction that should make any professional wince. If you are a service business: if your entire proposition is that you are better at this than your customer could ever be on their own, what does it say about you when your website looks like you couldn't be bothered? When it reads like it was written by a machine in four minutes? When it says nothing that your three nearest competitors aren't also saying?

You are telling people, in the clearest possible way, that you don't take your own business seriously enough to write about it properly. Why on earth would they take you seriously?

So what should you actually do?

Think about your customers. Not in the abstract, but actual people. What do they worry about? What do they get wrong before they come to you? What questions do they always ask? What do you wish they understood before they picked up the phone?

Write about that. In your own words. The way you'd explain it to someone sitting across a desk from you.

It doesn't need to be long. It doesn't need to be clever. It needs to be real, and it needs to be useful and it needs to sound like you.

That is what potential customers want to see and what search engines like Google look for. Customers, actual human beings who pay you money for your product or service, are rather more valuable than a green light on a plugin.

The beans were magic in the fairy tale. In real life, you have to do the work.