As generative AI shows little sign of slowing down, ChatGPT remains the front runner with 68% of the global market share and one of the most powerful tools for SEO teams to improve their productivity.
While human expertise provides strategic thinking, nuance and creativity that can’t be replicated, ChatGPT can enhance our capabilities as marketers, and free up a whole lot of precious time.
This article explores the practical relationship between ChatGPT and SEO and reveals how I use this powerful tool to improve keyword research, content planning, technical audits and optimisation tasks, quickly, efficiently and safely.
Is using ChatGPT bad for SEO?
Firstly, is the use of ChatGPT inherently bad for SEO? I would lean towards ‘no’, if used correctly and with a conscience (which the best SEOs have).
The key risks are primarily connected to laziness, frankly – for example, not checking AI-generated text for factual errors, not providing sufficient guardrails or context, or simply relying on generic outputs.
Used responsibly, ChatGPT can accelerate SEO delivery and is the same as having a highly efficient, eager-to-please assistant by your side.
ChatGPT vs other LLMs: When to use Perplexity or Gemini
While ChatGPT is a solid all‑rounder (and likely the first LLM widely used by SEOs), it’s important to recognise that that there are other models that can be a better fit for certain tasks.
Perplexity, for example, is often more effective for real‑time, citation‑backed research thanks to its built‑in web search, making it useful for validating facts or gathering the freshest SERP insights.
Google’s Gemini is the choice for tasks closely tied to Google’s ecosystem such as analysing AI Overview patterns or interpreting search behaviour trends.
How to use ChatGPT for SEO: 7 high impact processes to try today
Here are my top tips for day-to-day SEO techniques made better with ChatGPT:
#1 ChatGPT for SEO research
ChatGPT can provide a solid foundation for keyword discovery and strategic research, especially for new topics where I might have limited understanding. It can help to:
- Build keyword clusters
- Extract semantic themes and entities
- Identify subtopics from competitor pages (either paste copy into ChatGPT directly or point it to a live URL)
- Generate initial ‘People Also Ask’ ideas
- Analyse and assist with AI Overview targeting – e.g. what type of language is used, how is a typical answer structured?
This information can be used to produce more effective content and keyword strategies. However, always make sure to validate search volume independently as ChatGPT can only speculate.
#2 ChatGPT for content planning
Content planning can be a long-winded, multi-stage process but ChatGPT can simplify it by turning scrappy tasks into a structured, repeatable frameworks.
With the right prompting, it can support you with everything from initial ideation to full planning with attached dates and owners. Use ChatGPT to produce:
- content calendars and templates tailored to campaign goals
- topic clusters that reveal new angles
- recommended content formats, such as guides and side-by-side comparisons
- internal linking logic – upload your full list of URLs with metadata and ask for recommended related pages, anchor text and link placements
- full content briefs (with target keywords, search intent, USPs and semantic entities) – you can even train ChatGPT on existing briefs for consistency
#3 ChatGPT for SEO content writing (safely!)
Writing content using generative AI is a thorny topic, and one I’d never recommend automating blindly. While ChatGPT has undoubtedly transformed content research, writing and editing, it must be used with more than a pinch of caution and editorial oversight.
Fully automating content production runs the risk of factual error, generic AI-sounding copy (“delve”, anyone?), diluted expertise and, ultimately, content that fails both users and search engines. Let it work with you rather than for you, for example:
- Evaluate and provide feedback on first drafts – does this article convey the intended message or meet search intent?
- Adjust tone of voice – share anonymised brand guidelines and let ChatGPT rewrite sections to match your house style
- Simplify technical explanations – who is your audience and will they understand the content?
- Identify gaps or missing sections
- Last minute typo sweeps
- Restructure content around search intent – where should the CTA be placed?
Remember: effective and safe content writing with ChatGPT requires human editorial control – always review, refine and rewrite.
#4 ChatGPT for creating useful (and SEOfriendly) FAQs
One of ChatGPT’s greatest strengths is its canny ability to refine and structure short blocks of text, which makes it ideal for helping you to create highly useful FAQs. Why not ask it to:
- Extract relevant questions from existing page copy
- Determine long-tail FAQs on a topic that can then explored and validated with your keyword research tool of choice
- Improve existing FAQ clarity and scannability
- Produce ‘People Also Ask’-style questions using a seed keyword
- Develop product or service-specific FAQs to address common barriers, issues and queries and improve conversions
As above, always remember to refine and rewrite any generated content.
#5 ChatGPT for SEO technical audit validation
ChatGPT is an effective companion to a comprehensive technical SEO audit with your crawler of choice. By combining a full crawl export with the right amount of context, you can use ChatGPT to validate and refine your findings before it goes any further.
Here’s how it can upgrade your next tech audit:
- Prioritise issues effectively – provide your own notes and context (e.g. known issues), historical quirks or priorities – also explain any weighting differences from your crawler (e.g. prioritising quick wins over long-term improvements, if that is what is required)
- Validate your own manual observations – do your insights hold up?
- Flag false positives (e.g. ‘errors’ flagged by crawling tools that aren’t actual issues)
- Identify any patterns you may have missed – e.g. template-level faults or unexpected relationships across pages
- Generate client-friendly summaries of impact and required action – perfect for non-technical stakeholders. Consider it a final QA step to ensure that everyone is on the same page
- Automatically suggest reputable sources (e.g. Google documentation, industry blogs) to support your recommendations
#6 ChatGPT for Schema markup recommendations
Schema markup (or structured data) is a valuable technical tactic for improving the readability of content for LLMs and more traditional search visibility.
I often use ChatGPT to assist with the creation of JSON-LD snippets, by providing the raw HTML of the page and additional context of the page’s purpose and asking it to suggest which schema is most appropriate.
Always validate the final code with schema markup validator and Rich Text Test and ask ChatGPT to check the latest view on supported schema by Google – which you should double check, of course.
ChatGPT for meta optimisation – at scale
ChatGPT is an excellent tool for generating or refreshing meta descriptions at scale, especially when you apply the right constraints to ensure quality and consistency. To get the best results, I feed ChatGPT:
- Three strong, existing meta description examples to act as a ‘gold standard’
- Clear boundaries on the output – such as a maximum of 160 characters, specific tone of voice, an instruction to avoid cliché or repeated phrasing, encouragement to click through (e.g. variations on ‘Discover more.’)
- A list of required URLs and corresponding page content to ensure the meta description is reflective of the content rather than a generic guess
This approach is particularly effective during website migrations, clean-up projects or large-scale content refreshes, and can save hours of manual writing time. As always, human review is critical.
Conclusion: ChatGPT is essential to SEO delivery in 2026
ChatGPT isn’t a shortcut – it’s a sophisticated, assistive tool that can help SEOs to:
- Research topics faster and more effectively
- Plan better with clearer processes and automation of time-consuming manual tasks
- Produce stronger, more comprehensive content that fills gaps
- Validate technical audits and cross-check data before they reach clients
- Scale metadata tasks safely and efficiently during migrations or large content refreshes
- Build richer, more helpful FAQ content that supports
Used carefully, it can improve efficiency and support more consistent SEO delivery. AI doesn’t replace the SEO, it just makes it more effective, much quicker and more valuable.
MRS Digital’s top ChatGPT and SEO tip
Don’t rush your prompts. I find that ChatGPT performs best when it’s treated like a trusted (albeit sometimes confidently incorrect) collaborator – challenge what it tells you, ask for sources and for it to justify its decisions, and guide it with your own considered feedback.
Iterative prompting produces higher quality responses than simple commands, so take your time and turn it into a conversation.
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