I use AI and automation throughout my work, and I think you should know exactly how. The short version: the tools do the repetitive work quickly, and I do the thinking, the checking and the sign-off. Nothing an AI tool produces goes to a client or onto this site without me reviewing it first.
Why I use AI at all
Automation is the reason I can offer big-brand search experience without the big-agency bill. An audit that would take days of manual data pulling runs in hours, which means the time you pay for goes into judgement and getting things fixed, not copying numbers into spreadsheets.
What AI and automation do
In client work and on this site, AI tools and my own automated systems handle:
- Data gathering: pulling Search Console, analytics, crawl and Google Ads data, and joining it together
- Analysis: spotting patterns such as pages losing clicks, keywords close to page one, or overlap between paid and organic search
- Research: collecting and summarising sources on a topic, which I then check against the originals
- First drafts: outlines and draft copy for articles and pages, written from my briefs and my voice guide
- Technical output: schema markup, redirect maps, sitemaps and report formatting
- Code: help building sites, tools and apps, which I test before anything goes live
What AI never does
- Invent experience. Examples, results and learnings come from real projects. If I don’t have one, the article doesn’t get one.
- Publish on its own. Every article, page and report is read, edited and approved by me.
- Make the final call. Recommendations to clients are my recommendations. The tools surface the data, and I decide what matters.
- Create images that carry data. Charts and figures come from the real data, not from an image generator, because generated images get numbers and text wrong.
- Replace sources. An AI summary is never cited as a source. Claims link to the primary source I’ve checked.
How I check AI output
Every figure in a report is cross-checked against the platform it came from before it’s sent. In articles, every claim is checked against the linked source, and every draft goes through an editing pass for accuracy and a separate pass to remove the phrasing that makes AI writing easy to spot. The process is set out in full in the editorial policy.
Client data
Client data isn’t exposed through AI tools. The work uses imports and exports of the data needed for a task, such as Search Console, analytics or crawl data, and no personally identifiable information is retained. Client data isn’t used to train AI models. Project data is kept for up to three months after the work ends.
Google’s position
Google’s guidance on using generative AI content says AI can be useful for researching a topic and adding structure to original content, and that what matters is whether content is helpful. Its spam policies target scaled content abuse: many pages created mainly to manipulate rankings, however they’re made. Everything here is written to be genuinely useful, and published under a named author who stands behind it.
Questions
If you’d like to know how AI would be used on your account specifically, get in touch and I’ll walk you through it. You can also read about how I work with clients from start to finish.