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11 Disadvantages Of ChatGPT Content

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11 Disadvantages Of ChatGPT Content

ChatGPT produces content that is comprehensive and plausibly accurate.

But researchers, artists, and professors warn of shortcomings to be aware of which degrade the quality of the content.

In this article, we’ll look at 11 disadvantages of ChatGPT content. Let’s dive in.

1. Phrase Usage Makes It Detectable As Non-Human

Researchers studying how to detect machine-generated content have discovered patterns that make it sound unnatural.

One of these quirks is how AI struggles with idioms.

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An idiom is a phrase or saying with a figurative meaning attached to it, for example, “every cloud has a silver lining.” 

A lack of idioms within a piece of content can be a signal that the content is machine-generated – and this can be part of a detection algorithm.

This is what the 2022 research paper Adversarial Robustness of Neural-Statistical Features in Detection of Generative Transformers says about this quirk in machine-generated content:

“Complex phrasal features are based on the frequency of specific words and phrases within the analyzed text that occur more frequently in human text.

…Of these complex phrasal features, idiom features retain the most predictive power in detection of current generative models.”

This inability to use idioms contributes to making ChatGPT output sound and read unnaturally.

2. ChatGPT Lacks Ability For Expression

An artist commented on how the output of ChatGPT mimics what art is, but lacks the actual qualities of artistic expression.

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Expression is the act of communicating thoughts or feelings.

ChatGPT output doesn’t contain expressions, only words.

It cannot produce content that touches people emotionally on the same level as a human can – because it has no actual thoughts or feelings.

Musical artist Nick Cave, in an article posted to his Red Hand Files newsletter, commented on a ChatGPT lyric that was sent to him, which was created in the style of Nick Cave.

He wrote:

“What makes a great song great is not its close resemblance to a recognizable work.

…it is the breathless confrontation with one’s vulnerability, one’s perilousness, one’s smallness, pitted against a sense of sudden shocking discovery; it is the redemptive artistic act that stirs the heart of the listener, where the listener recognizes in the inner workings of the song their own blood, their own struggle, their own suffering.”

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Cave called the ChatGPT lyrics a mockery.

This is the ChatGPT lyric that resembles a Nick Cave lyric:

“I’ve got the blood of angels, on my hands
I’ve got the fire of hell, in my eyes
I’m the king of the abyss, I’m the ruler of the dark
I’m the one that they fear, in the shadows they hark”

And this is an actual Nick Cave lyric (Brother, My Cup Is Empty):

“Well I’ve been sliding down on rainbows
I’ve been swinging from the stars
Now this wretch in beggar’s clothing
Bangs his cup across the bars
Look, this cup of mine is empty!
Seems I’ve misplaced my desires
Seems I’m sweeping up the ashes
Of all my former fires”

It’s easy to see that the machine-generated lyric resembles the artist’s lyric, but it doesn’t really communicate anything.

Nick Cave’s lyrics tell a story that resonates with the pathos, desire, shame, and willful deception of the person speaking in the song. It expresses thoughts and feelings.

It’s easy to see why Nick Cave calls it a mockery.

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3. ChatGPT Does Not Produce Insights

An article published in The Insider quoted an academic who noted that academic essays generated by ChatGPT lack insights about the topic.

ChatGPT summarizes the topic but does not offer a unique insight into the topic.

Humans create through knowledge, but also through their personal experience and subjective perceptions.

Professor Christopher Bartel of Appalachian State University is quoted by The Insider as saying that, while a ChatGPT essay may exhibit high grammar qualities and sophisticated ideas, it still lacked insight.

Bartel said:

“They are really fluffy. There’s no context, there’s no depth or insight.”

Insight is the hallmark of a well-done essay and it’s something that ChatGPT is not particularly good at.

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This lack of insight is something to keep in mind when evaluating machine-generated content.

4. ChatGPT Is Too Wordy

A research paper published in January 2023 discovered patterns in ChatGPT content that makes it less suitable for critical applications.

The paper is titled, How Close is ChatGPT to Human Experts? Comparison Corpus, Evaluation, and Detection.

The research showed that humans preferred answers from ChatGPT in more than 50% of questions answered related to finance and psychology.

But ChatGPT failed at answering medical questions because humans preferred direct answers – something the AI didn’t provide.

The researchers wrote:

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“…ChatGPT performs poorly in terms of helpfulness for the medical domain in both English and Chinese.

The ChatGPT often gives lengthy answers to medical consulting in our collected dataset, while human experts may directly give straightforward answers or suggestions, which may partly explain why volunteers consider human answers to be more helpful in the medical domain.”

ChatGPT tends to cover a topic from different angles, which makes it inappropriate when the best answer is a direct one.

Marketers using ChatGPT must take note of this because site visitors requiring a direct answer will not be satisfied with a verbose webpage.

And good luck ranking an overly wordy page in Google’s featured snippets, where a succinct and clearly expressed answer that can work well in Google Voice may have a better chance to rank than a long-winded answer.

OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT, acknowledges that giving verbose answers is a known limitation.

The announcement article by OpenAI states:

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“The model is often excessively verbose…”

The ChatGPT bias toward providing long-winded answers is something to be mindful of when using ChatGPT output, as you may encounter situations where shorter and more direct answers are better.

5. ChatGPT Content Is Highly Organized With Clear Logic

ChatGPT has a writing style that is not only verbose but also tends to follow a template that gives the content a unique style that isn’t human.

This inhuman quality is revealed in the differences between how humans and machines answer questions.

The movie Blade Runner has a scene featuring a series of questions designed to reveal whether the subject answering the questions is a human or an android.

These questions were a part of a fictional test called the “Voigt-Kampff test“.

One of the questions is:

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“You’re watching television. Suddenly you realize there’s a wasp crawling on your arm. What do you do?”

A normal human response would be to say something like they would scream, walk outside and swat it, and so on.

But when I posed this question to ChatGPT, it offered a meticulously organized answer that summarized the question and then offered logical multiple possible outcomes – failing to answer the actual question.

Screenshot Of ChatGPT Answering A Voight-Kampff Test Question

Screenshot from ChatGPT, January 2023

The answer is highly organized and logical, giving it a highly unnatural feel, which is undesirable.

6. ChatGPT Is Overly Detailed And Comprehensive

ChatGPT was trained in a way that rewarded the machine when humans were happy with the answer.

The human raters tended to prefer answers that had more details.

But sometimes, such as in a medical context, a direct answer is better than a comprehensive one.

What that means is that the machine needs to be prompted to be less comprehensive and more direct when those qualities are important.

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From OpenAI:

“These issues arise from biases in the training data (trainers prefer longer answers that look more comprehensive) and well-known over-optimization issues.”

7. ChatGPT Lies (Hallucinates Facts)

The above-cited research paper, How Close is ChatGPT to Human Experts?, noted that ChatGPT has a tendency to lie.

It reports:

“When answering a question that requires professional knowledge from a particular field, ChatGPT may fabricate facts in order to give an answer…

For example, in legal questions, ChatGPT may invent some non-existent legal provisions to answer the question.

…Additionally, when a user poses a question that has no existing answer, ChatGPT may also fabricate facts in order to provide a response.”

The Futurism website documented instances where machine-generated content published on CNET was wrong and full of “dumb errors.”

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CNET should have had an idea this could happen, because OpenAI published a warning about incorrect output:

“ChatGPT sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers.”

CNET claims to have submitted the machine-generated articles to human review prior to publication.

A problem with human review is that ChatGPT content is designed to sound persuasively correct, which may fool a reviewer who is not a topic expert.

8. ChatGPT Is Unnatural Because It’s Not Divergent

The research paper, How Close is ChatGPT to Human Experts? also noted that human communication can have indirect meaning, which requires a shift in topic to understand it.

ChatGPT is too literal, which causes the answers to sometimes miss the mark because the AI overlooks the actual topic.

The researchers wrote:

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“ChatGPT’s responses are generally strictly focused on the given question, whereas humans’ are divergent and easily shift to other topics.

In terms of the richness of content, humans are more divergent in different aspects, while ChatGPT prefers focusing on the question itself.

Humans can answer the hidden meaning under the question based on their own common sense and knowledge, but the ChatGPT relies on the literal words of the question at hand…”

Humans are better able to diverge from the literal question, which is important for answering “what about” type questions.

For example, if I ask:

“Horses are too big to be a house pet. What about raccoons?”

The above question is not asking if a raccoon is an appropriate pet. The question is about the size of the animal.

ChatGPT focuses on the appropriateness of the raccoon as a pet instead of focusing on the size.

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Screenshot of an Overly Literal ChatGPT Answer

11 Disadvantages Of ChatGPT ContentScreenshot from ChatGPT, January 2023

9. ChatGPT Contains A Bias Towards Being Neutral

The output of ChatGPT is generally neutral and informative. It’s a bias in the output that can appear helpful but isn’t always.

The research paper we just discussed noted that neutrality is an unwanted quality when it comes to legal, medical, and technical questions.

Humans tend to pick a side when offering these kinds of opinions.

10. ChatGPT Is Biased To Be Formal

ChatGPT output has a bias that prevents it from loosening up and answering with ordinary expressions. Instead, its answers tend to be formal.

Humans, on the other hand, tend to answer questions with a more colloquial style, using everyday language and slang – the opposite of formal.

ChatGPT doesn’t use abbreviations like GOAT or TL;DR.

The answers also lack instances of irony, metaphors, and humor, which can make ChatGPT content overly formal for some content types.

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The researchers write:

“…ChatGPT likes to use conjunctions and adverbs to convey a logical flow of thought, such as “In general”, “on the other hand”, “Firstly,…, Secondly,…, Finally” and so on.

11. ChatGPT Is Still In Training

ChatGPT is currently still in the process of training and improving.

OpenAI recommends that all content generated by ChatGPT should be reviewed by a human, listing this as a best practice.

OpenAI suggests keeping humans in the loop:

“Wherever possible, we recommend having a human review outputs before they are used in practice.

This is especially critical in high-stakes domains, and for code generation.

Humans should be aware of the limitations of the system, and have access to any information needed to verify the outputs (for example, if the application summarizes notes, a human should have easy access to the original notes to refer back).”

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Unwanted Qualities Of ChatGPT

It’s clear that there are many issues with ChatGPT that make it unfit for unsupervised content generation. It contains biases and fails to create content that feels natural or contains genuine insights.

Further, its inability to feel or author original thoughts makes it a poor choice for generating artistic expressions.

Users should apply detailed prompts in order to generate content that is better than the default content it tends to output.

Lastly, human review of machine-generated content is not always enough, because ChatGPT content is designed to appear correct, even when it’s not.

That means it’s important that human reviewers are subject-matter experts who can discern between correct and incorrect content on a specific topic.

More resources: 

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Featured image by Shutterstock/fizkes



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Time To Replace the Content Marketing Funnel (3 Alternatives)

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Time To Replace the Content Marketing Funnel (3 Alternatives)

You won’t read anything good about the content marketing funnel in this article. Only bad things. Like, it’s too linear and simplistic to address the complexities of customer journeys.

If you need a framework to build your content strategy on, it should probably be a no-funnel framework instead. And there are very good reasons for it.

A funnel in marketing is a multi-stage process that guides potential customers from first learning about a product to making a purchase.

Depending on the version, it has 3 – 6 stages, and it looks something like this:

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Traditionally, all content types have their designated place in each stage:

  • Top: product landing pages, ebooks, guides, most social media posts, etc.
  • Middle: webinars, case studies, lead nurturing programs, etc.
  • Bottom: success stories, white papers, sales enablement materials, etc.

Makes sense, right? Not entirely.

It oversimplifies literally everything important for a content marketer. And because of that, the model gets some things completely wrong and ignores others.

This isn’t just theoretical. I’ve applied the funnel approach at various companies. Initially, it was reassuring, providing a sense of structure and control. However, the deeper I got, the more confusing it became. It started to seem like the sense of order was purely imaginary, as there was no reliable method to verify if people were truly following the funnel.

1. Misunderstands consumer behavior

The funnel model assumes a perfectly linear path from awareness to purchase and tries to rush people through it. Or, actually, it makes you think you should rush people through it with your content.

However, consumer behavior is more complex and non-linear. People often jump between stages, revisit them, or take unique paths to purchase.

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So, the journey is not a funnel; it’s more like a maze.

Illustrative B2B Buying JourneyIllustrative B2B Buying Journey
Source

B2C customer journeys are even more peculiar. Remember that time when you saw an ad and bought that product immediately? Or conversely, how the journey from see to buy lasted for years. I know I can:

Short and long buyer journey examples.Short and long buyer journey examples.

But content marketers shouldn’t try to solve that maze, or cut a straight line through it just for their convenience. They should rather adapt to it.

2. Tries to fit round pegs in square holes

Not all content types can be, nor should be, fit into rigid stages of the funnel, as the model wants it.

Here’s an example based on one of our articles. Which stage(s) of the marketing funnel does our blog post about “How to find low competition keywords” serve?

Example of content fitting multiple stages of the funnel with explanation.Example of content fitting multiple stages of the funnel with explanation.

As you can see, the model can’t handle one of the basic forms of content marketing – a blog post. But take any type of educational content, and you’ll find the same problem. Many content types can serve multiple stages of the funnel or work across them. They can both attract and reengage a visitor or even bring them all the way from discovery to purchase.

Because of that, the content marketing funnel simply isn’t helpful for creating content that’s enjoyable for the user and effective for the business.

3. Neglects customer retention

Customer retention is how good you are at keeping your customers. It’s important because you don’t want customers to buy just once from you; you want to keep coming back so that you don’t need to attract a total stranger each time to make a sale — that’s both hard and expensive.

Here’s another way to look at it. According to the study by Bain and Company, increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%. And it makes total sense if you think about it — if someone asked you to generate an extra $1000 in sales in 24 hours, would you go to existing customers or try to find new ones?

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But if you’re practicing the old ways of the funnel, catering to your existing customers is very limited because the funnel ends at the purchase stage. There’s nothing a content marketer can do nor should do after a prospect becomes a customer.

It’s having a party where you’re so focused on inviting new guests that you forget to entertain the ones already inside.

4. Ignores customer expansion

If you only chase new customers and forget about the ones you already have, you miss the chance to make more sales to them or get them to recommend your business to others. Happy customers can really boost your business by buying more and telling their friends about you.

How can content help with that? One good way is to create product-led content. This type of content is designed to show how your product can solve the customer’s problem.

The mechanism is simple: showing product features in action turns a regular user into a power user. They start to use more features and get better value from them, which builds loyalty and gives you a good ground for upselling.

And if that content is really good, people will share it with others, amplifying your brand’s reach.

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The best thing: good content will be recommended not only by your customers. People don’t really need to be your customers or know a lot about your brand to give your content a shout-out on social media.

The best solution to the shortcomings of the funnel is to have no funnel at all. Here’s why:

  • Adapting to consumer behavior, not forcing it. Focus on how consumers naturally interact with content rather than trying to dictate their journey. Make your content easily accessible without imposing how it should be consumed.
  • A more efficient use of content marketing. Content can work both pre-sales and post-sales. It doesn’t have to be useful in one moment in time. It can be designed to stay useful and relevant over time.
  • A more helpful way to create content. No time wasted on deciding whether that guide you’re about to write belongs to the top or middle of the funnel. You can simply focus on delivering value and delighting your audience.

Here are three different no-funnel models that share those advantages.

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This approach is about using your content to directly boost demand for your product, whether before or after a sale.

Instead of sorting content by stages of a sales funnel, you rate it based on how closely it relates to your product.

The Business Potential Framework.The Business Potential Framework.

So for example, for a content marketing tool, topics with high business potential would include content marketing metrics, “B2B content marketing”, “content ideation”, “content optimization”, and “content distribution” (and not an interview with content marketers or “history of content marketing”, etc.).

This scoring system makes planning your content strategy really easy. You can quickly decide how much of each type of content to make. Also, you can use it with other important metrics (we use it with organic traffic potential) to further prioritize content.

Ahrefs has been using this model for years, especially for SEO content, which is most of what we publish. It’s great for understanding which search terms are most valuable.

Take these two keywords below as an example. The first one has a lot more traffic potential but is too broad to easily include our product — it would get a “1.” Conversely, the keyword with less traffic but more focused on SEO would get a “3” because it’s more relevant to our customers and our product.

Traffic potential data via Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer.Traffic potential data via Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer.

The Business Potential Framework might be a good fit for you if you’re working in an established industry, where there’s already considerable demand for content directly linked to products like yours. This will make it easier to find topics with a score of 2 and 3. You can gauge that demand by looking at search volume in our free keywords generator.

Free keyword research with Ahrefs' Free Keyword Generator.Free keyword research with Ahrefs' Free Keyword Generator.

The Content Playground, devised by Ashley Faus, reimagines the buyer’s journey as an open, interactive space, akin to a playground, moving away from the traditional funnel’s linear path.

Content playground visualization. Content playground visualization.

It aims to cater to varied audience interests and learning styles by offering a mix of deep dives, strategic frameworks, and practical tips. To achieve this, it covers topics in three levels:

  • Conceptual: covering big ideas and their significance.
  • Strategic: outlining frameworks and processes.
  • Tactical: providing specific, actionable steps.

Staying with the content marketing tool example, topics you would create content about could look like this: “what is content marketing” (conceptual), “developing a content marketing strategy” (strategic), “how to promote content” (tactical).

To illustrate, this content hub on Agile from Atlassian is designed to be a content playground. There is a mix of all three types of content, and the user can start at any point, go as deep as they like, and jump to another topic at any time.

Example of content playground in practice.Example of content playground in practice.

Naturally, the content needs to be interlinked and ungated so consumers may access it however they want and navigate through it freely. The bonus of that is getting organic traffic from related keywords. According to Ahrefs, this one hub attracts over 591k organic visits every month, and it looks like it’s about to get more.

Organic performance graph via Ahrefs.Organic performance graph via Ahrefs.

But a playground doesn’t need to be confined to one site. As long as you tackle a topic with these three types and allow people to access them freely, you can have it scattered across a limitless number of sites and platforms: microsites, blog posts, social media, email, ebooks, etc.

I had a brief chat with Ashley, the mind behind this framework, to understand where this framework fits best. I learned that the framework was developed and tested with B2B marketers in mind, and that’s where it’s most relevant. B2C marketers simply don’t have as big of a problem with customers “coming and going” and re-engaging them on different channels.

There is a way to cover all customer intents, topics, journey stages, and key marketing channels naturally by simply focusing on what matters to your audience and where they are willing to consume content. I call it the Cluster-Channel Network (CCN).

Two core elements of the framework are:

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  • Clusters: thematic groupings of content around a central topic, supported by a network of related subtopics. They represent things people care about.
  • Channels: platforms and mediums through which your message reaches your audience. They represent meeting places that bring you and your audience together to talk about things they care about. Think advertising, email, social media, Google, etc.

CCN ensures a multi-channel presence with content that both attracts your audience and makes your brand an authority in a carefully picked selection of topics.

What’s more, this is an efficient framework because it allows you to “squeeze out” the most of any topic. That’s an important benefit because there are only so many topics a brand can comfortably cover, without creating turning into a content farm spinning irrelevant content just for the sake of traffic.

The framework consists of five steps.

  1. Identify relevant clusters: choose clusters aligned with your brand’s expertise and audience interests.
  2. Define subtopics: within each cluster, pinpoint subtopics for comprehensive coverage.
  3. Produce core content: select a primary channel and format for in-depth content, making this your centerpiece to attract traffic from other platforms.
  4. Distribute across channels: repurpose the core content into smaller, channel-specific formats.
  5. Interlink clusters and subtopics: connect related clusters and subtopics. Chances are, people interested in more than one cluster (e.g. SEO and content marketing).

If we were to visualize this framework consisting of four clusters, it would look something like this:

Visualization of the Cluster-Channel framework. Visualization of the Cluster-Channel framework.
Content playground could be visualized as a fully connected network with 3 node sizes.

So if we used content marketing as a cluster, one of the subtopics could be AI content. For that subtopic, you could create a blog post about ethics in content marketing in the AI era and distribute it as a thread on X, offer that topic to podcast hosts, etc.

This framework will work best if you have the resources to be present on multiple channels and you’re committed to long-term goals (building trust and authority takes time).

Tip

You can find clusters and subtopics very fast using Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer. Just plug a broad term related to your product (your cluster), and let AI do the brainstorming.

Using AI to aid keyword research process in Ahrefs.Using AI to aid keyword research process in Ahrefs.

From a bit over 10 keywords the AI found for me for the word “SEO”, Keywords Explorer found over 32k keywords which then organized into 3466 ready-to-target topics in a matter of seconds. All with traffic potential and keyword difficulty metrics to help with prioritization.

Clusters by Parent Topic report in Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer. Clusters by Parent Topic report in Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer.

Final thoughts

On a final note, the topics you choose to cover are as important as these frameworks. Check out our guide to content ideation to never run out of ideas.

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How to Avoid Ruining SEO During a Website Redesign

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How to Avoid Ruining SEO During a Website Redesign

It’s too easy to break your SEO during a website redesign. Here’s a foretaste of what can go wrong:

  • Loss of rankings and traffic.
  • Loses of link equity.
  • Broken pages.
  • Sluggish page loading.
  • Bad mobile experience.
  • Broken internal links.
  • Duplicate content.

For example, this site deleted about 15% of organic pages (yellow line) during the redesign, which resulted in an almost 50% organic traffic loss (orange line). Interestingly, even the growth of referring domains (blue line) afterward didn’t help it recover the traffic.

Fortunately, it’s not that hard to avoid these and other common issues – just six simple rules to follow.

Easily overlooked but could save the day. A backup ensures you can restore the original site if anything goes wrong.

Ask the site’s developer to be prepared for this fallback strategy. All they will need to do then is redirect the domain to the folder with the old site, and the changes will take effect almost instantly. Make sure they don’t overwrite any current databases, too.

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It won’t hurt to make a backup yourself, too. See if your hosting provider has a backup tool or use a plugin like Updraft if you’re using WordPress or a similar CMS.

Testing your site for Core Web Vitals (CWV) and mobile friendliness before it goes live is the best way to ensure that your new site will comply with Google’s page experience guidelines.

The thing is, a website redesign can seriously affect site speed, stability, responsiveness, and mobile experience. Some design flaws will be quite easy to spot, such as excessive use of animations or layout not scaling properly on mobile devices, but not others, like unoptimized code.

Ask your site developer to run mobile friendliness and CWV tests on template pages as soon as they are ready (no need to test every single page) and ask for the report. For example, they should be able to run Google Lighthouse on a password-protected website.

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An SEO audit uncovers SEO issues on your site. And if you do it pre-and post-launch, you will easily spot any potential new problems caused by the redesign, especially those that really matter, such as:

  • Unwanted noindex pages.
  • Sites accessible both as http and https.
  • Broken pages.

So before the new site goes, click on New crawl in Site Audit and then again right after it goes live.

Starting a new crawl in Site Audit.Starting a new crawl in Site Audit.

Then after the crawl, go to the All issues report and look at the Change column – new errors found between crawls will be colored red (fixed errors will be green) .

Change column in All issues report. Change column in All issues report.

You might want to give some issues higher priority than others. See our take on the most impactful technical SEO issues.

Tip

You can access the history of site audits by clicking on the project’s name in Site Audit.

How to access crawl history in Site Audit (1).How to access crawl history in Site Audit (1).
How to access crawl history in Site Audit (2).How to access crawl history in Site Audit (2).

By URL structure, I mean the way web addresses are organized and formatted. For example, these would be considered URL structure changes:

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  • ahrefs.com/blog to ahrefs.com/blog/
  • ahrefs.com/blog to ahrefs.com/resources/blog
  • ahrefs.com/blog to blog.ahrefs.com
  • ahrefs.com/site-audit to ahrefs.com/site-audit-tool

Altering that structure in an uncontrolled process can lead to:

  • Broken redirects: redirects leading to non-existing or inaccessible pages.
  • Broken backlinks: external links pointing to deleted or moved pages on your site.
  • Broken internal links: internal site links that don’t work, hindering site navigation and content discoverability.
  • Orphan pages: pages not linked from your site, making them hard for users and search engines to find.

Naturally, you should keep the old URL structure unless you’re absolutely sure you know what you’re doing. In this case, you will need to put some redirects in place. On top of that, make sure to submit a sitemap via Google Search Console to help Google reflect changes on your site faster.

Tip

Google also advises submitting a new sitemap if you’re adding many pages in one go. You may want to do that if that’s the case in your redesign project.

Redesigns often include some kind of content pruning or simply arbitrary deleting of older content. But whatever you do, it’s crucial that you keep the pages that are already ranking high.

Traffic is one reason, but since these pages are already ranking, chances are they’ve got some backlinks you risk losing.

To make sure you’re not cutting out the good stuff, use two reports in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer: Top pages and Best by links.

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Top pages report is a list of all the pages on your site ranking in the top 100, appended with SEO data and sorted by traffic by default. So, just one click on your left-hand side, and you’ll see a list of your best “traffic generators”.

Top pages report in Ahrefs' Site Explorer.Top pages report in Ahrefs' Site Explorer.

The Best by links report follows the same logic, but the focus is on links (both external and internal) and it shows all crawled pages on your site (not only the ones ranking in top 100).

Best by links report in Ahrefs' Site Explorer.Best by links report in Ahrefs' Site Explorer.

You can also plug in any page in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and see whether it can be cut without any damage to the site’s organic performance.

Looking up single page organic performance in Site Explorer. Looking up single page organic performance in Site Explorer.

Recommendation

If part of the redesign is an inventory cleanup, you can still get traffic to products you don’t offer anymore if you create an “archive” page and link to a place where visitors can find more similar products. E-commerce sites and hardware brands do that regularly.

Example of an archive page. Example of an archive page.

This way, you can still rank for related terms, and the user experience is better than simply redirecting old products to new products.

Lastly, if you find yourself in a situation where the new design imposes significant changes to your top-ranking pages, take extra caution when altering these elements:

Final thoughts

While an overall site redesign might sound like a good moment to introduce some SEO, you need to think about the traffic and backlink equity the site has already earned. If you change too much in one go, you won’t know what worked and why, and maybe more importantly, what didn’t work and how to fix it.

Truth is, SEO is always about experimentation. You can have a well-educated guess, but you can never really know what will happen.

Want to share your SEO story here? Let me know on X or LinkedIn.

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There’s No Such Thing as “Accurate” Search Volume

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There’s No Such Thing as “Accurate” Search Volume

I often post my favorite new Ahrefs features on X. And last time I announced our newest addition to Keywords Explorer, someone replied with this:

Which was not the first time I saw us being criticized for the accuracy of our search volume metric.

But here’s the kicker…

There’s NO SUCH THING as an accurate search volume:

  • The volumes in Google Keyword Planner aren’t accurate.
  • The “Impressions” in GSC aren’t accurate either.
  • And the metric itself is just an average of the past data.

I already published a pretty detailed article about the search volume metric back in 2021. But I don’t think too many people have read it.

“Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.”

André Gide

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So let me address this topic from a whole new angle.

First of all, what do SEOs even mean when they ask for search volumes to be “accurate?”

Well, the less experienced folks just want the metrics in third-party tools to match what they see in Google Keyword Planner (GKP).

But the more experienced ones already know all Google Keyword Planner’s Dirty Secrets:

  • The numbers are rounded annual averages.
  • Those averages are then assigned to “volume buckets.”
  • Keywords with similar meaning are often grouped together and their search volume summed up.

In other words, the search volume numbers that you see in GKP are very imprecise. And once SEOs learn that, they no longer use GKP as their baseline of accuracy.

They use GSC.

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Ok. So the numbers in GKP are rounded and bucketed and clustered together and all that. But Google Search Console (GSC) shows you the actual impressions for a given keyword, right?

Well, did you know that a simple rank-tracking tool can easily pollute your GSC impressions?

Think of how many different “robots” might be scraping the search results for a given keyword, and therefore giving you a fairly inaccurate impression of its real (human-driven) search volume.

And besides, in order to see the actual monthly search volume your page has to be ranking at the top 10 for thirty days straight. And it should rank nationwide, just in case the search results might differ based on the location.

On top of that, I’m sure GSC is no different from any other analytics tool in the sense that it might have certain discrepancies in “counting” those impressions. I mean, go compare the “Clicks” you see reported by GSC with your server log files. I bet the numbers won’t match.

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How much time do you think would pass between you selecting a certain keyword to rank for and actually having your page rank at the top of Google for it?

According to our old research, it could be anywhere from two months to a year for a newly published page to get to the top. Don’t you think the monthly search volume of a given keyword will change by then?

That’s actually the exact reason why we’ve added search volume forecasting to our Keywords Explorer tool. It uses past data to project what would likely happen to search volume in the next 12 months:

Is it accurate? No.

But does it help to streamline your keyword research and make better decisions? Absolutely.

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Let’s do a thought experiment and imagine that there was an SEO tool which would give you a highly precise search volume for any keyword. What would you use it for? Would you be able to accurately predict your search traffic from that keyword?

No!

You can’t know for sure at which position your page will end up ranking. Today it’s #3, tomorrow it’s #5, the day after is #1. Rankings are volatile and you rarely retain a given position for a long enough period of time.

And even if you did: you can’t get precise data on the click-through rate (CTR) of each position in Google. Each SERP is unique, and Google keeps rolling out more and more SERP features that steal clicks away. So even if you knew precisely the search volume of a keyword and the exact position where your page would sit… you still would not be able to calculate the accurate amount of search traffic that you’ll get.

And finally…

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Pages don’t rank for a single keyword! Seven years ago we published a study showing that a typical page that ranks at the top of Google for some keyword would actually rank for about a thousand more related keywords.

So what’s the point of trying to gauge your clicks from a single keyword, when you’ll end up ranking for a thousand of them all at the same time?

And the takeaway from all this is…

Here at Ahrefs we spend a tremendous amount of time, effort and resources to make sure our keyword database is in good shape, both in terms of its coverage of existing search queries, and the SEO metrics we give you for each of these keywords.

None of our SEO metrics are “accurate” though. Not search volume, nor keyword difficulty, nor traffic potential, you name it.

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But none of them can be.

They’re designed to be “directionally accurate.” They give you an overall idea of the search demand of a given keyword and if it’s a lot higher (or lower) compared to some other keywords which you are considering.

You can’t use those metrics for doing any precise calculations.

But hundreds of thousands of SEO professionals around the world are using these exact metrics to guide their SEO strategies and they get precisely the results that they expect to get.



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