AI has changed how I work after nearly two decades in digital marketing. The shift has been meaningful, freeing up time, reducing the grinding parts of the job, and making some genuinely hard tasks faster.

That doesn’t mean it does the work for you, transforms everything overnight, or saves you 40 hours a week. In real-world SEO, with real clients and real deadlines, it’s a tool that makes parts of the job easier, not something that replaces the work itself.

Here are 20 ways I actually use it. Some are specific to SEO. Some are broader, but relevant to anyone working in the industry. All of them are practical, tested, and honest about their limitations.

Content creation and copywriting

1. Writing first drafts

The single best way to use AI for content is to stop expecting it to produce something publishable and start treating it as a very fast first-draft machine. 

• Feed it your brief, your target keyword, your audience, and your angle. Get a structure back. 
• Then rewrite it in your voice. Add in the expertise that only you know, not a vanilla version of what’s online.

The content AI produces out of the box is average. Your job is to make it good. Reference real-life stories, case studies, and statistics, and showcase your personal viewpoint and expertise.

The time savings are in not starting from a blank page.

2. Generating meta title and description variations

Give Claude or ChatGPT your target keyword, page topic, and character limits. Ask for 10 variations of your meta title and descriptions. You’ll use one, maybe combine two, but the process takes two minutes instead of 20. For large sites with hundreds of pages, this alone is worth the subscription.

Many tools allow you to upload CSV files, add AI’s suggested ideas, and download them for review. Don’t skip this step. A human eye is where the value sits

3. Refreshing underperforming content

Paste an existing page or blog post that has dropped in rankings. Ask AI to identify what’s missing, what could be expanded, and what feels outdated. 

It won’t always be right, but it gives you a starting point instead of reading the whole thing yourself with fresh eyes you don’t have at 4 p.m. on a Thursday.

Make sure to give context. Long prompts with lots of detail will produce much better results than pasting a page in cold. 

4. Generating FAQ sections

Prompt AI to generate the 10 most common questions for your target keyword. Cross-reference with People Also Ask and your own research. 

Answer them, and you now have an FAQ section, featured snippet opportunities, and a content gap analysis in about 10 minutes.

5. Writing alt text at scale

Nobody enjoys writing alt text for 200 product images. Describe the image, give it the context of the page it sits on, and include the target keyword. Then ask for alt text that’s descriptive and naturally includes the term where relevant. It’s not glamorous, but it’s necessary and faster.

You can also run a website through Screaming Frog, export it to a CSV file, upload it to your AI of choice, and ask it to write the alt text. This only works well if the file names are descriptive, and again, a human eye is key. This is about increasing speed, rather than handing it over to AI completely.

Dig deeper: How to use AI for SEO without losing your brand voice

Technical SEO

6. Understanding error messages and log files

Not everyone working in SEO has a developer background. AI is useful for:

• Translating technical error messages.
• Explaining what a server log is telling you.
• Helping you understand why a page is excluded from indexing. 

Paste in the output, ask it to explain it in plain English, and then ask what the fix should be. Verify the answer, but it gets you most of the way there.

7. Writing schema markup

Schema is one of those things everyone knows they should be doing more of, and nobody finds especially enjoyable. 

Describe the content of your page to your AI of choice, tell it what schema type is relevant (FAQ, Article, LocalBusiness, Product, etc.), and ask it to generate the JSON-LD. 

Check it in Google’s Rich Results Test before implementation. This used to take me 20 minutes per page type. Now it takes five.

8. Creating regex for Google Search Console

If you use regex in GSC filters and you’re not a developer, AI is your new best friend. Describe what you’re trying to filter, for example, all URLs containing a specific subfolder, or all queries including a particular term, and ask for the regex string. 

It gets it right more often than not, and you can ask it to explain the logic so you actually understand what you’re implementing.

9. Analyzing crawl data with prompts

If you export a crawl from Screaming Frog or Sitebulb and you’re not sure what to prioritize, paste the summary data into your AI tool and ask it to help you identify the highest-priority issues based on the site’s goals.

It won’t replace your expertise, but it’s a useful sounding board when you’re staring at a spreadsheet with 47 issues and a client call in an hour.

Dig deeper: 6 tactical ways to responsibly use AI for everyday SEO

Reporting and analysis

10. Writing the narrative around the numbers

This is one of the most underrated uses of AI in SEO work. You have the data. You have the graphs. What takes time is writing the commentary that explains what happened, why, and what comes next. 

Feed AI your key metrics and the context of what was happening that month (algorithm updates, campaign launches, seasonality), and ask it to draft the narrative section of your report. Edit it, add your actual insight, but stop writing it from scratch every month.

You can even upload reports from various data sources and ask it to combine and summarize them. This saves me hours every month when I’m putting together reports.

11. Summarizing long reports for clients

Not every client wants to read a 12-page report. Ask AI to summarize your report into a five-bullet executive summary. Give it to clients at the top of the document. 

The ones who want details will read on. The ones who don’t will feel informed without asking you to talk them through every chart on the next call.

Ask AI to create the executive summary for someone who doesn’t know anything about SEO, and it’ll give you something simple and easy to understand.

12. Identifying anomalies in data

Paste a table of your keyword rankings or traffic data, and ask AI to flag anything that looks unusual, including significant drops, unexpected gains, or patterns that don’t match the previous period. 

It won’t replace proper analysis, but it’s a useful first pass when you’re managing a large amount of information and can’t give every dataset the attention it deserves.

Dig deeper: How to build AI confidence inside your SEO team

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Research and competitor analysis

13. Conducting competitor content gap analysis

List your top three competitors and your own site. Ask AI to help you think through what content topics they’re likely covering that you’re not, based on their positioning and audience. 

Then, validate that with actual keyword research tools. AI can’t see competitor data directly, but it’s useful for hypothesis generation before you do the manual work.

14. Understanding a new industry quickly

When you take on a client in an industry you don’t know well, you need to get up to speed fast. Ask your AI to give you a primer on the industry: 

• Key terminology.
• The main players.
• The buying cycle.
• How people typically search for solutions in this space.
• What the common pain points are. 

It saves you an embarrassing amount of time in discovery calls.

15. Identifying search intent mismatches

Paste a list of your target keywords and ask AI to categorize them by search intent: informational, navigational, commercial, and transactional. Then compare that against the page type you’re targeting them with. 

You’ll almost certainly find mismatches. This is a task that’s straightforward to describe, but tedious to do manually across hundreds of keywords.

Dig deeper: How to use AI response patterns to build better content

Client communication and account management

16. Drafting difficult client emails

Everyone has had to write a difficult email, whether it’s explaining why rankings have dropped, why a deadline was missed, or why they need to do something you know they don’t want to do. 

These emails take a disproportionate amount of emotional energy to write. Give your AI the situation, the context, and what you need the client to understand or do, and ask for a draft that’s clear, professional, and honest.

Edit it. Send it. Move on.

17. Writing SOPs and process documentation

If you’ve been meaning to document your processes and just haven’t gotten around to it, AI removes the excuse. 

Describe a process out loud (or in rough notes), paste it in, and ask for a structured SOP with numbered steps, decision points, and notes. 

The first version will need editing, but having a framework to work from is the difference between getting it done and it sitting on the to-do list for another quarter.

18. Preparing for client calls

Before a client call, paste in your recent report data, any issues from the previous month, and what you need to cover. 

Ask your AI to help you structure the agenda and anticipate questions the client might ask based on the data. You’ll go into the call more prepared and less likely to be caught off guard.

Productivity and admin

19. Processing your own thinking

This one sounds vague, but it’s one of the ways I use AI most. 

When I have a problem I can’t get clear on, a strategy decision I’m going back and forth on, or a piece of work I can’t find the right angle for, I talk it through with Claude (my AI buddy of choice) to clarify my own thinking. It asks questions, reflects things back, and helps me arrive at a point of view faster than I would staring at a blank document.

Ask your AI to be brutally honest with you. Otherwise, it’ll just keep agreeing with you and telling you that you’re truly an expert on every topic.

20. Building prompts you actually reuse

The biggest productivity gain from AI isn’t any individual use. It’s building a library of prompts that work for your specific workflow and reusing them consistently.

Every time you get a good result from an AI tool, save the prompt. Over time, you build a system, rather than starting from scratch every time. This is the thing most people skip, and it’s the thing that compounds.

Top tip: In the paid version of many AI tools, you can create projects and have specific instructions for each one. This is invaluable for saving time by not having to include all of this information in every prompt you use.

Dig deeper: Why SEO teams need to ask ‘should we use AI?’ not just ‘can we?’

What these use cases don’t replace

None of these tips replace the expertise, judgment, and client relationships that make a good SEO professional.

AI doesn’t know the business the way you do. It doesn’t understand the nuance of an industry, the history of an account, or the particular quirks of a contact you deal with regularly.

AI reduces the time spent on tasks that don’t require that expertise, so you have more of it available for the work that does.

Use AI as a tool. Stay skeptical of the hype. And for the love of good search results, edit everything before it goes anywhere near a client.

Dig deeper: Could AI eventually make SEO obsolete?