been doing seo content for my saas for about 6 months. first 3 months i was using chatgpt directly, pasting articles into wordpress, expecting traffic. got basically nothing.
looked into why. the articles were ranking page 4-5 on average. read a bunch of case studies and the pattern was obvious in hindsight.
the 3 things that were killing my rankings:
no citations. my articles said things like "studies show that content marketing generates 3x more leads." what studies? google's quality raters literally check for this. i started requiring real sources with URLs for every data claim. not 1-2 footnotes at the bottom — inline citations throughout. annoying to do but it changed my avg ranking position from page 4 to page 2 within 8 weeks on the articles i updated.
identical sentence structure. AI writes in a very predictable pattern: statement. explanation. another explanation. summary. repeat. every paragraph. real writing has short sentences mixed with long ones. sometimes fragments. once i started breaking this pattern in editing, bounce rates dropped noticeably.
no actual opinion. AI hedges everything. "it depends on your situation." "there are pros and cons to both approaches." readers (and google) want you to take a position. "X is better than Y for early-stage saas because Z" performs better than "both X and Y have their merits."
the citation thing had the biggest impact by far. i now aim for 15+ per article. sounds like a lot but once you're in the habit of backing up claims it becomes natural.
if anyone's doing AI-assisted content for their saas, the tl;dr is: don't publish anything that makes a claim without linking to where that claim comes from. that single rule filters out most of the "AI-ness" automatically.