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“We pulled off an SEO heist using AI”: Did One Thread Turn All of Twitter Against AI?
Things got heated on Twitter yesterday when Jake Ward (@jakezward on Twitter) shared his tactic for “stealing” keywords from a competitor.
Par for the course in SEO, right?
Wrong.
Ward positioned his tactic as a “heist”. But it didn’t have the critical reception of George Clooney in Oceans 11.
Here’s the tweet that set Twitter off:
In case you don’t have Twitter, you can also read it written out here:
We pulled off an SEO heist that stole 3.6M total traffic from a competitor.
We got 489,509 traffic in October alone.
Here’s how we did it:
We pulled off an SEO heist using AI.
1. Exported a competitor’s sitemap
2. Turned their list of URLs into article titles
3. Created 1,800 articles from those titles at scale using AI
18 months later, we have stolen:
– 3.6M total traffic
– 490K monthly traffic
How we did it?
18 months ago, this was a totally manual process.
Today, there are tools to help automate 90% of the process.
Here’s how:
1. Find a competitor
Which website ranks for the keywords you want to rank for?
– Brainstorm
– Use Ahrefs/Semrush
– Manually search on Google
2. See their sitemap
To find your competitor’s sitemap, add the following to their domain:
http://website.com/sitemap.xml
Their sitemap shows a list of all the URLs on their website.
However, the URLs in the sitemap must be descriptive to get the best results…
For example:
❌ http://website.com/t/1043423
✅ http://website.com/how-to-make-soup
3. Export sitemap
Google “convert XML to CSV” and use one of the free tools to export the sitemap as a CSV file.
4. Generate ideas
Using the list of competitor URLs, it’s time to generate article ideas.
Add the URLs from the sitemap into Byword’s Write From URLs feature and scrape the URLs.
Byword generates article titles and outlines based on the competitor URLs provided.
For example: http://website.com/how-to-make-soup might get translated to: A Beginner’s Guide to Making Soup
5. Write with AI
Optional: Edit the suggested titles and headings for the articles…
Once ready, generate AI content for your final set of articles.
6. Publish quickly
Publish the content straight onto your website using CMS integrations (to save time).
Results?
Using this process, we published 1,800 articles in a few hours.
Since then:
– 490K monthly traffic
– 3.6M total since publishing
– 13K keywords on page 1 of Google
The best part? We’ve taken that traffic from our competitors.
@jakezward
Twitter Turns on AI
Almost immediately, the thread that gathered over 9.8k bookmarks sparked controversy.
While some publishers were saving the technique for later or calling it genius, others were calling Ward’s method cringe, shameful, scum, and spam.
The last response hits home for many SEOs, myself included.
The technique of mining a competitor’s keywords isn’t unique. I’ve written articles on it before.
But the focus is usually on outperforming your competitors by providing higher quality content. Ward is pushing quantity over quality, which has divided AI lovers.
Is AI Ruining the Internet?
The Verge recently reported that SEO is ruining the internet, but the comments on this thread are very clear: AI is the problem.
As an avid AI user myself, I disagree that AI is the problem. I’ve often said that AI is like a calculator. You can use it to solve complex equations and better the world … or you can write “Boobs” and laugh with your friends.
Ward’s strategy is very much the latter.
The #1 red flag I saw in his thread when I first skimmed it was the “optional” element of editing the title, and then no mention ever again about editing content.
For full transparency, Ward is using this post to promote an AI tool he seems to have some affiliation with, as Dr. Marie Haynes pointed out:
This causes immediate copyright issues beyond even the potential plagiarism and “theft” of stealing all those keywords from their competitor.
If you don’t edit AI content, you have no copyright on the material. Copyright can only be held by humans, and thus for human-generated content.
Or Is This SEO As Usual?
Mike of Niche Twins points out that the real villain in this AI story might not be the AI users or people like Ward exploiting the system, but the system that rewards this:
Mike makes many excellent points, including that we can all debate the morals/ethics of Ward’s system and success, but we ultimately need to look at the search engine that is rewarding these tactics: Google.
Is This the End of AI?
I don’t think this spells the end of AI.
Ward succeeded in a marketing campaign that got people talking.
It got people excited about AI, riled up about how unfair Google is, and annoyed at the potentially thin new content that will take over the SERPS.
I was intrigued by the idea of what Ward was talking about, but found myself opting out the moment the posts went unedited.
And it’s not because I feel AI is “stealing” – AI is stealing the same way a kid writing a Shakespearean style sonnet is stealing or a newbie following the structure of an existing blog post is stealing.
I think it can steal, but it’s on the user to prevent the need for it by training the model as much as possible on their own style, tone, and research.
The part I disagreed with was that the content Ward was outputting offered nothing new or of value to the users. That’s where the “content goblins” idea from The Verge’s recent article comes from. That’s how the SERPs become so unusable that you can’t even find out how many legs a chicken has. That’s how people turn on AI content, and forget that there is a way to use it to benefit society and SEO.
What are your thoughts on this debate? Share your thoughts in my free Facebook Group, SEO for Bloggers to have a critical but civil discussion on the thread that has seemingly turned Twitter against AI content.
