Here Are 3 Legitimate Uses Of AI For Your Website

I’ve talked about the impact of AI on website owners when it comes to writing content that’s more “human-like”, and leveraging the unique attributes humans can offer. I’ve also written about the kinds of websites that I think will thrive in the future. But what does all this mean for your existing website? Is there a way you can legitimately use AI to help you improve without dealing with thorny ethical questions of AI content?

After using ChatGPT for a while, and experimenting with what it’s capable of, here are three ways to use it beneficially.

1. Simple Coding Tasks

You should use this only if you’re already familiar with some coding and are looking for quick prototypes of code to get started. I’m amazed at the ability of ChatGPT to create complicated code for all kinds of purposes. Most of the time, you can get these snippets on forums like StackExchange, but you have to hunt for the right one, and chances are that you’ll have to modify it anyway.

ChatGPT can give you a good starting point for the code or (if you’re lucky) write perfect code immediately. Here’s an example.

Let’s say my WordPress theme doesn’t show the last modified date, and I want to add this to my posts. Instead of asking Google and then getting a snippet from StackExchange, I ask the following question to the AI:

“Write a PHP code snippet for WordPress that displays the date the post was last modified using the filter to show the date above the content.”

Here’s the response:

That’s a perfect piece of code on the first try! Here’s what it looks when I paste the above code into my functions.php:

In this example, my test theme already displays the post’s publication date, so I’ll need to make additional modifications. But look at how wonderfully the code works. I didn’t even know about WordPress’s “get_the_modified_date()” function.

But of course, you must double-check everything and ensure it’s doing what you want. But if you want a good prototype for simple code snippets, AI is fantastic.

2. Generating Structured Data

I’ve always found structured data annoying. If Google is so great, they should be able to generate the data from the website content itself. Look at this query I posed to ChatGPT, requesting it to generate JSON-LD structured data for a product:

Generate a JSON-LD structured data snippet for a product called “Widgets” with a price of $2 and a description that says “Amazing widgets”. The product review rating is 3 out of 5 stars and has an inventory of 3.

Here’s the response:

Holy Moly!! Mind. Officially. Blown. Mind you, it’s not perfect. I need to modify the price to reflect the “offers” schema, but the basic skeleton is there! Using the validator schema, you can test the code it generates, tweak it, and use it.

I plan to use this for various schemas like FAQs, “How-tos”, and more.

3. Finding Related Topic Clusters

I think AI can be really useful in finding topics related to our current topic. This is a great starting point for keyword research and deciding how to approach a topic. For example, here are ChatGPT’s recommendations for topic clusters related to web hosting:

These are all excellent recommendations, and a human could do a lot worse than this. We’re just getting started with integrating ChatGPT into our workflow, and we haven’t even scratched the surface of what’s possible. I would pay for ChatGPT in a heartbeat since it’s like an “all-in-one” tool – not just for SEO, but for ordinary questions and research.

If Google has been holding back its technology for fear of disrupting its business model, I hope ChatGPT blows them out of the water. It’s been a long time coming.

Go AI!