Does AI content work for AEO and SEO? Or will it completely ruin your business?
I'm Andrei, and I run Literally.dev. We're a content marketing agency that specializes in AEO and high-converting content for technical audiences. This year, we've analyzed more than 100,000 AI recommendations for over 80 companies. And we've increased AI mentions for our customers by 400% on average.
One question we've been discussing for the past two years is this: does AI content work? That's what we'll explore here.
Why We Were Against AI Content
Let me give you a bit of history. We used to be heavily against AI content. There were three reasons.
First, the same low-quality AI content was popping up everywhere.
Second, there was a rush to automate content, and we worried that search engines would ban AI content any day. In the early 2000s, SEO people stuffed pages with keywords in transparent text, along with all sorts of other shenanigans. We worried that spamming AI content would lead to the exact same consequences, and that Google rankings would collapse.
Third, we believed that human content is better, because AI can't share its experiences. It can share the knowledge and data it was trained on. But it doesn't have the experience of living in this world, and that seems to matter to humans. For example, AI has dominated chess since the '90s. But people still prefer to watch other people play, and they prefer to play chess against other humans too.
During our holiday team call last year, a colleague even said that she likes working with us because "we are saving the internet." She meant that we're a beacon of human content at a time when everything is drowning in slop. In fact, slop was Merriam-Webster's word of the year for 2025. So it all made a lot of sense, and we took a lot of pride in creating human content.
What the Studies Say
The reality is much more nuanced.
It's true that human content beats AI content in some ways. An NP Digital study found that human-written content got 5.44 times as much traffic as AI-generated content. And an August 2026 study says that human content drives 87% of organic traffic.
These were fairly small studies, so take them with a grain of salt. But on average, we can accept that human content still does better than AI content.
Does that mean AI content is useless trash? No.
The Real Test: Is It Useful?
Most people look at this as a one-dimensional problem. As if content only gets judged on a line, with AI on one end and human on the other. But that's not how it works. That might be part of it, but content gets judged in many other ways too:
- How much time do people spend reading it?
- How original is the information?
- Do people stop searching after they find the article? Or do they close the tab and open five other articles on the same question?
All these data points add up to answer one simple question: is this content useful? That's what it's all about. Does this content give the reader value or not?
So the question becomes: can AI content be useful? Yes, absolutely. If you're looking for a price breakdown, you probably don't need Dostoevsky to write it for you.
On the other hand, if you want thought leadership, you might not want AI to write it. That comes back to the point that AI doesn't have lived experience, and lived experience is the spark behind an original thought. It gets muddy when you have an original thought but not the skills to put it into words, so you ask AI to do that for you.
But the question here is whether AI content works for AEO and SEO, not whether it works for thought leadership. And the answer is, without a doubt, yes. It works. I've seen it work again and again, and I've seen it beat human content too.
I'd personally be happier if it didn't, for completely selfish reasons. We run a content agency, and handcrafted, human content has been a big part of what we've sold in the past years. But AI content does work.
What AI Content Needs to Work
Let me add a quick caveat. There's a big difference between asking ChatGPT to write an AEO-optimized article for you, and having the right systems in place to create AI-assisted content that performs.
You also need to know what to do with that content. If your plan is to post it on your blog and profit, you're setting yourself up for disappointment.
So even if AI writes your content, make sure it has:
- Usefulness
- High quality
- A purpose
- A concrete plan for distribution
If you need help with any of this, that's what we do at Literally.dev. We specialize in AEO and technical content marketing. Tech companies can apply for a free AEO analysis.
Nobody Cares Who Wrote It
Very few people care whether your article was written by a human or by AI. They care whether it answers their question, solves their problem, or teaches them something useful.
And if it doesn't do any of those things, it doesn't matter how much time you spent creating it.
