OpenAI had barely made the research edition of ChatGPT available to the public when marketers and media pundits began predicting that the generative AI wordsmith would (well) eat Google’s search business for breakfast. Now, with an “Extra E” update to its own E-A-T quality rater guidelines, Google bites back.
We’re going to take a look at what this means for content marketers. But first, let’s do a quick refresher.
What is ChatGPT?
As we wrote a few weeks ago:
ChatGPT is a large language model trained by OpenAI to generate human-like text based on the input it receives. It’s a variant of GPT-3 (Generative Pretrained Transformer 3), the machine learning model that’s considered to be one of the most advanced technologies for generating convincing, high-quality written content. ChatGPT was specifically designed for conversational text generation, meaning it’s good at generating responses to questions or requests on a wide variety of topics based on the data with which it was trained. Meaning, it’s essentially a super-helpful chatbot.
While its true innovation is its conversational interface, it has taken the business world by storm (and by surprise) for its ability to quickly churn out convincing but ultimately undistinguished and occasionally problematic copy, arguably no worse than what you’d expect from a low-cost SEO content chop shop. (See our first impressions.)
What Was E-A-T?
As a content marketer, you may not be playing with ChatGPT yet but you should certainly be familiar with E-A-T, the content quality framework used by Google’s quality raters (real, live human beings by the way, not part of the algorithm). This framework — along with the more recent helpful content update (this one is part of the algorithm) — helps ensure that the results that top the rankings are actually useful to humans, and not just keyword-jammed junk that feeds (and fools) the machine.
E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness. And Google’s massive 175-page quality raters guidebook defines what each of these means.
To be clear, E-A-T isn’t a ranking factor per se. There’s no “E-A-T Score,” for example. It’s essentially, as I understand it, a set of principles to guide the otherwise subjective human review of web content that serves as one — of many — inputs into the algorithm. That said, E-A-T has only gotten more important since its first introduction in 2014, and should also be an important framework for anyone writing human-first content for the web. Here’s how you might think about all this: Whenever a content strategist urges you to focus on quality content over quantity of content, E-A-T offers a bit of insight into what “quality” (an otherwise amorphous idea) actually means — at least as far as Google is concerned.
What’s E-E-A-T, with an Extra E?
On the heels of ChatGPT, Google has upgraded E-A-T to E-E-A-T, with the added E representing “Experience.” As Google defines it:
Consider the extent to which the content creator has the necessary first-hand or life experience for the topic. Many types of pages are trustworthy and achieve their purpose well when created by people with a wealth of personal experience. For example, which would you trust: a product review from someone who has personally used the product or a “review” by someone who has not?
While it’s difficult to say whether the update is a specific response to the rapid-fire rise in ChatGPT’s popularity or a more general response to janky content, it’s certainly a blow across generative AI’s bow. Why? Because while AI might deliver (or at least approximate) expertise, authority, and trustworthiness to one extent or another, it cannot have the kind of first-hand life experience you do.
What E-E-A-T Means for Your Content?
Google would tell you that Experience, like Expertise and Authority, is a component of Trust — the central factor for defining content quality. Like so:
But you can also think of Expertise and Experience as close cousins when it comes to demonstrating that you truly know what you’re writing about. And that you’re likely to be a living, breathing human with the right balance of knowledge (expertise) and real-world experience. Put another way, the Extra E rewards content creators who serve up the right amount of street smarts to go along with their book smarts.
Writing for Expertise might have you tapping into and attributing content to your organization’s best subject matter experts. Name them, display clear and complete bios alongside their content, publish author pages that collect their ideas as they’re expressed over time, and so on. Experts are a fantastic source for frameworks, advice, tips, and conveying factual information. To the extent that these things are in the “common canon” of your industry (and don’t need to be up-to-the-moment accurate), AI-generated content might do the trick. But when it comes to unique insights, fresh thinking, proprietary models, or a perspective that cuts against the grain (frankly, anything that makes your content original, differentiated, and authoritative), human experts win.
Writing for Experience might have you casting a wider net to gather practical perspectives from frontline employees involved with implementing your solutions, honest reviews or compelling stories from your customers, opinions from your target market, and other been-there-done-that-earned-the-badge evidence that only comes with lived (well, umm…) experience. While your SMEs might bring these things to the table, the nature of your content and the essence of your storytelling would be very different from straight-up expertise content. And while AI like ChatGPT could arguably serve up some form of “people say” proxy for experience, only real humans can bring true, first-hand perspective to the table. Experience is the unique purview of people.
Gathering a record of that experience — by identifying and engaging the right people, by asking better questions in well-run interviews, and so on — is (and will likely remain) the unique purview of the well-qualified human content creator.
5 Content Types That Show Experience
So, while there might be a time and place for ChatGPT-generated content, people are the secret sauce when it comes to trust, authority, and infusing your marketing with high amounts of Expertise and Experience. Let’s take a look at just five content types you should consider for amping up your organization’s Experience factor in particular.
- Incorporate practical how-to content into your mix. Calling upon people inside your organization or outside its walls who have been there, done that. Consider interviewing people in the trenches who can go beyond the process to share unique insights and implications, to highlight struggles in additional to successes, to offer practical and actionable advice based on personal perspective. Pepper your expert content with real-world examples from (named!) practitioners to bring concepts to life and show how to make ideas actionable.
- Elevate the voice of the customer. Give actual users of your product or solution a platform for sharing their stories. While case studies or testimonials might meet the bar here, go above and beyond by letting the companies you work with write (or speak) about the issues facing their organization, peers, and industry in ways that are honest, authentic, and not merely fodder for pitching your product. Interview clients for profile pieces. Round up the best thinking from multiple clients (or prospects) fo listicles that actually deliver valuable tips.
- Conduct original research. Survey your market, poll your audience or interview users about topics that matter to them. Produce and promote reports based on the findings. Reuse and repurpose data, insights and verbatims to feed your content channels.
- Use audio and video to bring experience to life. Produce a walk-through or talk-through that gives a first-hand look at work or process. Host a webcast, podcast, or video interview series featuring conversations between your experts and experienced outsiders. Show your solution in use, on-site (if that’s the sort of thing you sell). Clearly this one works well with any of the previous ideas. The key though lies in real faces and real voices delivering real perspectives.
- Host a conversation for your community. There’s a rising trend toward B2B communities as a marketing tactic. Those communities might live on a branded or private site, on a social platform like LinkedIn or even Facebook, or (heck) in the real world at a hosted event. Regardless, connections between people and open, honest conversations among them are their lifeblood. The resulting content — whether in the form of accessible threads in which professionals in your sector share ideas and opinions, or in the form of repurposed content that bubbles up and highlights those ideas and opinions (blog posts, social posts, round-ups, and more) — is ripe with real experience.
And that’s just a start. What are some other ways you can bring Experience to life in your content?
When you look at “Double E” E-E-A-T, it’s clear that Google sees what’s coming with ChatGPT and other AI writing tools: More and more low-value, cookie-cutter content. And they’re going all-in on one way to recognize and ultimately reward the content creators who demonstrate a greater commitment to giving voice to real people writing for real people.
Why? Because they know that an AI can’t gain the lived experience to make content that is as real, relevant, and resonant as a human who has actually walked the walk.
Looking back at the five content ideas we’ve shared it’s obvious that each requires you to do things that a tool like ChatGPT doesn’t do well (or really, at all). Get real input from real people and frame it in a way that provides value to your audience and delivers ideas that aren’t available from anyone (or anything — beep beep boop boop) else.
And that makes for a better, higher-quality content experience for more than just a search engine — which, after all, is what content marketing is all about.
