MetaMonster asked SEO and digital marketing professionals across our community how they’re actually using AI today: where it genuinely saves time, where it creates more work, how their approach has changed over the past year, and where they think AI-driven content optimization is headed next.
Here’s what they had to say.
TL;DR
AI has become the research-and-structure layer, not the writer. It’s fastest at sifting through SERPs, competitors, and keyword data, and it falls apart the moment it’s asked to supply expertise, judgment, or a point of view worth reading. Every person here drew that same line in their own words: AI executes, humans decide.
Trudy Rhodes
CEO, Rhodes Creative Co.
What should AI’s role be in SEO content creation today?
I think AI should have a limited role in creating SEO content, but it can be helpful for keyword research and developing content ideas.
Where have you seen AI fall short or create more work than it saves?
AI writing often doesn’t deliver and can end up creating more work instead of saving time. It rarely sounds natural or interesting, and most people can spot the usual words and phrases it uses. In my experience, AI writing tends to get repetitive, overlooks what customers actually want, and takes time away from real research and learning about the audience. It also adds to the flood of low-quality content online. While there are some situations where AI can help, I don’t think it should be used for writing content.
Has your agency’s approach to AI in content changed in the past year?
I used to work for an agency that relied on freelance writers to create content for our clients. As AI tools improved, the agency worried about falling behind and decided to use AI for the entire content writing process; I thought this was a mistake. AI can help with things like SEO outlines, headings, and finding content gaps, but it shouldn’t take over everything. After seeing the agency increasingly rely on AI, I decided to start my own creative agency focused on thorough brand and content development without AI.
If you had to bet on where AI’s role in content optimization goes next, what’s your prediction?
I believe AI can make content optimization easier, especially when working with spreadsheets during SEO audits. Soon, or maybe even now, it should be able to scan websites quickly, spot content that needs changes or removal, and update spreadsheets with those details.
Shraddhanvita Tiwari
Lead Organic Growth Strategist, Lean Summits
What should AI’s role be in SEO content creation today?
I think of AI as the ridiculously fast junior strategist on the team. Give it a task and it will happily research, organize, summarize, brainstorm and produce a first pass before you’ve finished your coffee. But I wouldn’t hand it the keys to the editorial department just yet.
Where does AI genuinely save you time or improve output in your content workflow?
Honestly, the biggest win isn’t “AI writes my article in 30 seconds.” That’s the least interesting part. The real time-saver is everything that happens before and after the writing. I can use AI to sift through SERPs, competitors, keywords, entities, customer questions and existing content much faster than I could manually. It helps me get from “here’s a giant pile of information” to “here are the five things that actually matter.” It’s also brilliant for repurposing. Once we have one genuinely good piece of content, AI can help turn it into briefs, FAQs, social posts, email angles, updates and other formats. Basically, I want AI doing the legwork so humans can do the thinking.
Where have you seen AI fall short or create more work than it saves?
Confidently being wrong. That’s probably my favorite AI superpower, if “superpower” is being used very generously. AI can give you a beautifully structured, wonderfully worded answer that contains a tiny factual error buried somewhere in paragraph seven. And because it sounds so convincing, it’s easy to miss. The other issue is sameness. Ask ten people to generate an article about the same topic, and you’ll often get ten versions of the same article wearing slightly different clothes. So sometimes the “time saved” gets spent hunting down sources, checking claims, injecting actual expertise, and trying to make the thing sound like it was written by a human with a point of view. AI can produce the draft. It cannot magically produce your experience. I’ve learned that AI scales whatever process you give it, including a bad one. If your content strategy is weak, AI will happily help you create 100 pieces of weak content instead of 10. If your brief is vague, you’ll get a beautifully written answer to the wrong question. And if nobody is checking the output, congratulations, you’ve just automated your quality-control problem. The most useful question isn’t “Can AI do this?” It’s “Should we be doing this at all?” That’s where human judgment still earns its salary.
Has your agency’s approach to AI in content changed in the past year?
A lot. Initially, the excitement was around making content production faster. Now we are much more interested in making the decision-making faster and smarter. We used to ask, “Can AI help us write this?” Now we’re asking, “Should we write this? What information is missing? What does the search landscape look like? What does the audience actually need? And, perhaps most importantly, will this be useful beyond getting a URL indexed?” The rise of AI search has made that shift even more obvious. We’re no longer thinking only about whether a page ranks. We’re also thinking about whether a brand is understood, surfaced, and cited by AI systems. So for us, AI has gone from being a writing assistant to becoming much more of an intelligence layer around SEO.
If you had to bet on where AI’s role in content optimization goes next, what’s your prediction?
We feel that the commodity will be content. The scarce resource will be something worth saying. We expect AI to increasingly sit quietly in the background, constantly looking at search behavior, competitors, customer questions, content performance, and AI search visibility, and telling us where the opportunities are. The interesting part will be what humans do with that intelligence. The brands that win won’t necessarily be the ones producing the most content. They’ll be the ones with the best original information, strongest expertise, and clearest point of view, and AI will help them distribute that knowledge much more intelligently. Basically, we think AI will make mediocre content cheaper. Which means being interesting will become even more valuable.
Shweta Gupta
Founder, Growwdigitaly
What should AI’s role be in SEO content creation today?
AI gives speed, but not direction. That part still sits with us. I use AI daily. But the decisions, the strategy, the judgement about what’s actually worth publishing, that’s human. There’s no point creating 40 blog posts that don’t align with your brand guidelines or speak to your audience’s real pain points. That’s just faster noise. So: humans decide and strategise. AI executes. Research before writing, clarity before cleverness, and usefulness before reach.
Where does AI genuinely save you time or improve output in your content workflow?
Research, mostly. Competitor analysis, forum mining, keyword clustering, spotting the themes in how people actually talk about their problems. Work that used to take me days. But it only produces something valuable when it’s fed the brand guidelines first. Give AI your voice, your audience, and their real pain points, and the output is genuinely useful. Skip that step and you get generic content that could belong to anyone.
Where have you seen AI fall short or create more work than it saves?
Hallucination, mostly. It will invent a statistic, a source, or a case study with complete confidence, and then I’m spending longer fact-checking than I would have spent writing it myself. But honestly? Most of the time that’s an input problem, not an AI problem. When I’ve been vague about what I want, I get vague back. Thin context, thin output. If you’re clear about the output you’re after and you give it enough input, brand guidelines, audience, examples, the thing you’re actually trying to achieve, it gives you great results. The work sits at the front end, not the clean-up.
Has your agency’s approach to AI in content changed in the past year?
Yes, quite a bit. A year ago it was prompt, get output, edit heavily. One big ask, one big mess to clean up. Now I build workflows. Each step does one job: research, then analysis, then structure, then draft, with human review built in at every stage rather than bolted on at the end. If something goes wrong, I know exactly which step broke it. The shift was realising AI isn’t a writer you hand a brief to. It’s a system you design. Get the sequence and the checkpoints right, and the output is far more reliable.
If you had to bet on where AI’s role in content optimization goes next, what’s your prediction?
Content creation is mostly solved. The next step is AI that watches performance, spots decay, and flags what needs updating before you notice. Less writing, more maintaining. Humans still decide what’s worth fixing.
Viola Eva
Founder, Flow Agency
What should AI’s role be in SEO content creation today?
It is an unrealistic expectation that we are not using AI in content creation today. Our enemy is not AI-generated content. The enemy is boring content and naive AI usage.
Where does AI genuinely save you time or improve output in your content workflow?
Deep research into new niches and topics, highly specific workflows for content outlining, creation, translation or distribution.
Where have you seen AI fall short or create more work than it saves?
AI can only be as good as your editorial process. Yes, AI can create a draft in rapid time but it doesn’t solve the issue of 4 approvers, 3 feedback cyclers and a broken content calendar. For AI to be effective, you need to adjust your entire process for efficient implementation.
Has your agency’s approach to AI in content changed in the past year?
Dramatically. We have built a designated innovation team and put about 10% of our workforce into it. There we build new systems for our internal processes as well as our team.
If you had to bet on where AI’s role in content optimization goes next, what’s your prediction?
Right now, everyone is applying similar hacks and ideas based on similar workflows and AI tools. Google has already started to roll out algorithm updates against spam and non-commodity content. I see us in the Hummingbird, Penguin, Panda era for most LLMs, too. So, what they like and how they prioritize is changing at a rapid pace. Next will be completely new content types that were expensive or impossible to do before. Think games, tools or truly useful applications as well as large-scale data studies.
Ila Bandhiya
Senior Digital Marketer, Middleware
What should AI’s role be in SEO content creation today?
AI should be a productivity and research partner, not a replacement for human expertise. It can help with research, content structuring, optimization, and ideation, while humans should own the insights, accuracy, originality, and final editorial decisions.
Where does AI genuinely save you time or improve output in your content workflow?
It saves significant time in topic research, creating outlines, identifying content gaps, analyzing search intent, summarizing research, and generating initial drafts. It’s also useful for repurposing long-form content into social posts and other formats.
Where have you seen AI fall short or create more work than it saves?
AI-generated content can become repetitive, generic, or overly predictable, especially when it lacks real product or industry context. Fact-checking and adding original insights can sometimes take longer than writing the content from scratch.
Has your agency’s approach to AI in content changed in the past year?
Yes. We’ve moved from using AI mainly for writing assistance to using it across the broader content workflow, from research and ideation to optimization and content distribution. At the same time, we’ve become more intentional about maintaining human expertise and originality.
If you had to bet on where AI’s role in content optimization goes next, what’s your prediction?
AI will move beyond optimizing content for search engines toward optimizing it for AI discovery and answer engines as well. Content teams will focus more on building authoritative, structured, experience-driven content that can be understood and surfaced across Google, AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and similar platforms.
Dawnisha Taylor
Founder/CEO, OnPoint
What should AI’s role be in SEO content creation today?
AI should be a tool, not the voice or the strategy. It can help with research, structure, optimization, and getting from an idea to a first draft faster, but the expertise and point of view still need to come from the business. For OnPoint, I want our content to sound like we understand the founder sitting on the other side of the screen, not like we generated an article because a keyword had search volume.
Where does AI genuinely save you time or improve output in your content workflow?
AI saves me the most time between having an idea and turning it into something usable. I use it to organize my thoughts, pressure-test messaging, develop outlines, repurpose ideas, and tighten copy. It helps me move faster without outsourcing the thinking. I still make the decisions about what we say, who we’re speaking to, and whether the final content actually sounds like OnPoint.
Where have you seen AI fall short or create more work than it saves?
When it’s asked to create expertise it doesn’t actually have. That’s when you get polished content that sounds right but says very little. I’ve also found that if I don’t give AI enough context about our audience, positioning, and voice, I can spend more time correcting generic copy than I would have spent writing it myself. The quality of the input and the human review still matter.
Has your agency’s approach to AI in content changed in the past year?
Absolutely. I’ve become much more intentional about where AI belongs in the process. Earlier, the appeal was largely speed, as in, how quickly can this help me create? Now I’m much more focused on whether it improves the quality of the work and supports the larger strategy. I use AI heavily as a thinking and execution partner, but I’m more protective of the human expertise, experiences, and point of view that make our content worth reading.
If you had to bet on where AI’s role in content optimization goes next, what’s your prediction?
I think we’ll move away from using AI to produce more content and toward using it to make better decisions about content. The bigger opportunity is helping businesses understand what their audience is searching for, where their existing content has gaps, what deserves to be updated, and how one strong idea can work across multiple channels. As AI-generated content becomes easier to produce, original experience and a clear point of view will become even more valuable.
Danielle Hixenbaugh
Founder, Bloom Digital Agency
What should AI’s role be in SEO content creation today?
AI learns from what is already published or created. It fails in innovation, creativity and the kind of perspective that can only be had when formed through the lived, human experience. AI is a hugely powerful tool to cut time on research, create markup schema, assess for readability and clarity, and ensure keyword phrases are appropriately formatted in articles. That’s where it should end. The value in content creation is generating something worth reading. I want to read and engage with content that is formed through someone’s expertise and experience, not from a robot spitting out “it’s not X, it’s Y” or emoji bulleted lists.
Where does AI genuinely save you time or improve output in your content workflow?
When I use Voice mode, it helps me make sense of my ideas. I am able to verbally process and collaborate with it on where my head is going. AI then uses that original thought and creates more clarity on the vision. Once we know where we are going, it can significantly cut time in research, analysis and editing.
Where have you seen AI fall short or create more work than it saves?
When I use it for idea generation, I find myself poking more holes than using exactly what it outputs. Sometimes its ideas do spark something in me and I use that, but often I find I would have saved time if I started the ideation with me. When it generates content entirely on its own, I often find I need to edit it entirely to get it to be the top 1% of content I strive to produce.
Has your agency’s approach to AI in content changed in the past year?
Yes. In the beginning, we got excited about the efficiency and output volume we could produce using AI. But consumers have quickly caught up and can spot AI very easily. Our client expectations of doing way more, for way less, have not yet shifted. We are constantly challenged on why they should pay us a retainer when “AI could do this,” but then when we produce content using AI assistance, it often gets labeled “AI slop.” We have pivoted workflows to using AI to help reduce administrative drag, ingest and analyze data, and create assets that would be very expensive to create, but the idea generation and strategy is completely human centric.
If you had to bet on where AI’s role in content optimization goes next, what’s your prediction?
I think that the middle-of-the-bell-curve adopters and laggards who are just starting to use AI will continue to be enamored with the outputs, while the early adopters will be able to spot it instantly and roll their eyes. Slowly, as the laggards catch up, the pendulum will swing massively back to human-first. But just like the internet and the laptop, AI has forever changed how we work. We’ll always use it, but when to use it and when not to use it requires human judgement. The humans with the best taste and judgement will rise to the top.
Nicolas Garfinkel
Founder, Mindful Conversion
What should AI’s role be in SEO content creation today?
Discovery, ideation, and research. It can be a really powerful accelerator.
Where does AI genuinely save you time or improve output in your content workflow?
Content research. The ability to identify interesting trends in a matter of minutes is so powerful.
Where have you seen AI fall short or create more work than it saves?
It gets the tone completely wrong, and that can be really frustrating for the team. When we rely heavily on the outputs then realize one of the outputs just completely missed its mark, it can create more work rather than save time.
Has your agency’s approach to AI in content changed in the past year?
We build a lot of our own tools to help with this. For example, we recently built a SERP analyzer to help us understand how our content compares to existing content.
If you had to bet on where AI’s role in content optimization goes next, what’s your prediction?
If Google and other answer engines can properly identify and penalize full-AI content, then I think we see a lot more blended content, AI plus human. If that doesn’t happen, I think we’re in trouble, because it will be impossible to cut through the noise.
Abby Lovett
Founder/CEO, CTP Visibility Advisors
What should AI’s role be in SEO content creation today?
AI should provide the baseline and show what the “average” is out in the world. Let the humans use their beautiful, clever brains to uplevel the game.
Where does AI genuinely save you time or improve output in your content workflow?
Cross-checking facts and ensuring accuracy across different touchpoints.
Where have you seen AI fall short or create more work than it saves?
With almost every MCP integration, I encounter at least an hour, or more, of unexpected and “un-fun” work. That’s a lot for a rapidly growing company. We don’t have time for non-billable headaches.
If you had to bet on where AI’s role in content optimization goes next, what’s your prediction?
I see content creation playing a much larger role in “live” or dynamic advertising.
What it all adds up to
Nine practitioners, one set of questions, and almost no disagreement about where the line sits. A few patterns showed up again and again.
AI’s real job is everything around the writing, not the writing itself. Shraddhanvita Tiwari put it best: the “AI writes my article in 30 seconds” part is the least interesting one. Trudy Rhodes, Shweta Gupta, Viola Eva, Ila Bandhiya, and Nicolas Garfinkel all pointed to the same set of tasks: SERP and competitor research, outlining, keyword clustering, spotting content gaps, and repurposing one good piece into briefs, social posts, and FAQs. That’s where the time actually gets saved.
The final call stays human, no exceptions. Every single contributor drew this line somewhere: Trudy Rhodes started her own agency over it, Shweta Gupta and Dawnisha Taylor both said outright that AI executes while humans decide, and Danielle Hixenbaugh argued AI simply can’t produce the lived experience and perspective that makes content worth reading in the first place.
The failure modes are consistent, too. Shraddhanvita Tiwari and Shweta Gupta both called out confident hallucination, inventing a stat or source and stating it as fact. Trudy Rhodes and Nicolas Garfinkel flagged tone and voice as the place AI reliably gets it wrong. And several people noted the “sameness” problem: thin or vague input produces generic output that could belong to any brand.
The whole industry asked a different question this year. Shraddhanvita Tiwari, Dawnisha Taylor, and Danielle Hixenbaugh each described the same shift in their own words: last year the question was “can AI write this?” This year it’s “should we write this, what’s actually missing, and does this hold up beyond getting a URL indexed?” Shweta Gupta and Viola Eva took that further by rebuilding their workflows around it, breaking one big prompt-and-edit cycle into separate research, analysis, structure, and draft steps with human review built into each one.
What’s next looks like less writing and more watching. Shweta Gupta and Shraddhanvita Tiwari both expect AI to shift toward monitoring: sitting in the background, tracking content decay and performance, and flagging what needs attention before a human notices. Ila Bandhiya expects the target to shift too, from optimizing purely for search engines to optimizing for how AI discovery and answer engines understand a brand.
And a couple of pressure points nobody’s fully solved. Danielle Hixenbaugh is watching the “AI slop” backlash collide with client expectations of doing more for less. Abby Lovett is watching a more practical problem: nearly every MCP integration she touches costs her team an unplanned hour of cleanup. Both are reminders that the tooling and the market haven’t caught up to each other yet.
The throughline across all nine answers is the same one from every roundup we run: AI is genuinely useful for the parts of content work that used to eat entire days, research, structure, and repurposing, but the parts that make content worth reading, the expertise, the judgment, the point of view, are still and will remain entirely human.
