Why Massive AI-Produced Real Estate Content Strategies Backfire
When it comes to creating a solid search strategy, based on a comprehensive content strategy, that dominates search results and consistently brings in high-quality leads, one thing’s for sure: it takes time, and it could take a lot of time depending on what market you’re in and how competitive it is.
But with AI, it seems like it’s a lot easier to scale your content production so that you could skip a lot of time it takes, and then move right to the results phase.
After all, if you just use AI to crank out 50+ blog posts in a week, based on your topic strategy you want to show up in search results for, you’ll be able to dominate those search results in a few days rather than a few months or even years, right?
And at first thought, it even seems like it could be easy and work.
You give the AI a few prompts about your target audience’s interests, it generates a few thousands of words of polished-looking filler content, you hit publish, and you watch your search metrics climb. Then, you sit back and wait for the leads to roll in.
And for a short time, it seems to work. But then, it doesn’t. So what happened? And why should you avoid this type of approach?
The Mirage of AI Generated Content
When an agent launches an aggressive, massive, AI-produced content strategy, the initial metrics tend to look fantastic. They might see a sharp increase in their Google Search Console clicks and impressions, their dashboard metrics might be up, and it could feel like they’ve finally figured out SEO and that they’re well on their way to building a solid, long-term search strategy.
But this spike is a total mirage; and worse than that, this approach has the ability to permanently and completely destroy not just your search strategy, but your entire overall digital strategy, so the stakes are high. Here’s why:
1. Because Metrics Are Built On Vanity
One of the biggest mistake in marketing that agents make is mixing up traffic volume with business success – especially if it’s part of a traffic spike as the result of a massive AI-produced content strategy push.
That’s because, in most cases, the traffic that you get won’t be within your target audience, which is the AI’s fault on both the content production side and the AI results side because it can’t connect the two.
So, if you get traffic to your website, but that traffic doesn’t include anyone that actually wants to buy, sell, or even engage with a real estate agent, does that really help your overall marketing strategy?
High impressions look great, but if it doesn’t contribute to an increase in contacts, leads, or transactions, then that traffic is essentially useless.
2. Because There’s an Absence of Engagement
Getting people to click through to your real estate website in a search result is only 50% of the marketing battle; the other half is what they do once they actually get to your website – and a great metric for measuring that is your engagement rate, which comes from measuring engaged sessions.
A session is considered an engaged when someone does any one of the following on your website:
- Stays longer than 10 seconds,
- Clicks to additional page (has 2+ page views),
- Or converts by completing a key event.
★ If you want to learn more about engagement rate, have a look at this post called: Measuring the Success of Your Digital Strategy Through Engagement.
And in a lot of cases, purely AI-generated content, produced at scale, without human involvement, doesn’t create an engaged session because people just don’t like it, find it formulaic, and as a result, won’t engage with it.
So what happens instead? At least in traditional search results, the user clicks the back button, and selects the next result, which creates an unengaged session.
When Google notices that people are leaving your pages fairly quickly, it recognizes that your website wasn’t good for the search result, which will affect your entire search strategy.
★ Want to learn more about using AI in your real estate marketing strategy? Have a look at these posts:
- Why You Can’t Build an AI Visibility Strategy Without a Website
- Building a Real Estate Online Presence Strategy to Get Found in LLMs (like ChatGPT)
- Pivoting Your Website Content Strategy to See More Success in AI Search Results
- How, and Why, to Prove Your Experience to AI, LLMs, and Search Engines
- Why AI-Generated Real Estate Listings Hurt Your Brand Authority
3. Because You’ll Be Impacted By Google’s Core Updates
When it comes to understanding how Google’s search works, whether it’s traditional search results or AI search results, Google just wants to show the best possible answer to the question being asked.
Their algorithm is specifically designed to reward helpful, reliable, people-first content that displays real-world experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trust (otherwise known as EEAT).
And a massive amount of low-quality, AI-produced content is highly unlikely to meet EEAT.
That’s because Google really doesn’t like websites that have flooded the internet with low-quality, completely AI-generated articles. So if you take the approach of producing and posting a massive amount of low-effort AI-generated content, without any human oversight at all, you could wake up one morning to find your search traffic dropped by 80% or more.
And that could be permanent, or at least feel permanent, as the cleanup process to fix that mess is highly technical and could take months of agonizing work, all in an attempt to regain Google’s trust (and Google is not very forgiving once it thinks you’re trying to manipulate its search results).
Own It, Through Hard Work
At the end of the day, the best way to get results online is usually what takes the most amount of work, effort, and time, and a massive AI-produced content strategy is hardly the way to do that and get good results.
By focusing on creating content that’s meaningful, helpful, and high-quality, you’ll get better, long-term results that dominate your search topics and bring in high-quality, engaged traffic that actually wants to work with you, your brand, and your business.
Want to integrate AI into your long-term marketing strategy? Download our Artificial Intelligence in Marketing Planning Guide for Real Estate Agents. It has key insights into how you can plan for using AI in your marketing strategy to better set you and your business up for long-term digital success.
