ChatGPT vs. SEO Expert: An Ultimate SEO Showdown
AI vs. Human: The Ultimate SEO Trivia Contest
AI has read all the blogs, forums, and patents. It has access to a universe of SEO information. But can it apply that knowledge with the nuance and strategic thinking of a professional with 17 years of in-the-trenches experience? That’s the question we decided to answer.
SEO isn’t just about knowing the rules; it’s about understanding the unwritten ones. It’s about recognizing that what works for one site won’t necessarily work for another. It’s a field built on strategy, pattern recognition, and educated guesses.
To put this to the test, we pitted a human expert against a custom ChatGPT model trained on Ahrefs’ comprehensive SEO course. The AI acted as the quiz master, asking the questions and scoring the answers. The human was in the hot seat. Let’s see who came out on top.
Question 1: What does SEO stand for and what’s its primary purpose?
We started with a softball to warm up.
Expert’s Answer:
“SEO stands for search engine optimization and the purpose of it is to rank your pages higher in Google to gain visibility and to gain access to Google’s audience in search.”
ChatGPT’s Verdict:
“Solid. You nailed the acronym and the essence of SEO. Score 10 out of 10. Want me to turn up the difficulty a bit?”
Question 2: Explain the concept of search intent.
Next, a foundational concept that separates amateur SEOs from professionals.
Expert’s Answer:
“Search intent is the reason behind a searcher’s query. Google’s job is essentially to provide the most relevant result for any given query. If you’re not able to match the intent of a searcher for a query, then you are just not going to rank. For example, if you have a page targeting ‘best headphones,’ but instead of comparing different models, features, and price points, you’re only recommending one pair because that’s the one you stock, you’re not matching intent. People are looking for optionality.”
ChatGPT’s Verdict:
“That’s a sharp and nuanced answer. Score 10 out of 10. Let’s push it.”
Question 3: What are the four key factors for choosing a keyword?
Here, the AI tests the expert’s knowledge of a specific, popular framework.
Expert’s Answer:
“I can think of three right now. The three that come to mind immediately are search intent, the actual difficulty of the query—like can I actually compete—and business value, will this query attract people that are likely to purchase something from me?”
ChatGPT’s Verdict:
“You’re circling the right core ideas, but you missed some key nuance from the Ahrefs method: traffic potential. Score 7 out of 10. Want redemption with a followup on traffic potential?”
This was the first stumble. While the expert’s three factors are strategically sound, the AI was looking for a specific, textbook answer. This highlights a key difference: AI often relies on established frameworks, while experts may develop their own practical mental models.
Follow-up: Search Volume vs. Traffic Potential
The expert takes the chance for redemption.
Expert’s Answer:
“Search volume tells you how often a keyword is searched, while traffic potential shows how much traffic you could get if you rank number one for a topic. Because top pages rank for way more than just one keyword. And that’s why traffic potential is a better metric than search volume because it reflects traffic, which is what we’re after.”
ChatGPT’s Verdict:
“That’s the comeback I was looking for. 10 out of 10.”
Question 4: How would you decide what content format to create for a keyword with mixed search intent?
Now we’re moving from definitions to strategy.
Expert’s Answer:
“I would target the dominant intent. It’s rare that a SERP would only have one intent, and a page can serve many different intents. If there was transactional as well as informational intent but informational content was dominant, I would create an informational post first. It’s also worth noting that within informational content, you can still serve commercial intent, like in a typical affiliate blog post.”
ChatGPT’s Verdict:
“That’s a strong answer. You hit several expert-level marks. Score 9 out of 10. Why not a 10? You didn’t mention doing a keyword-level content gap analysis or using SERP features like featured snippets, video carousels, etc.”
Question 5: How would you structure an internal linking strategy for a large content site?
This question tests the ability to think about SEO at scale, a core component of many marketing automation examples that aim for efficiency.
Expert’s Answer:
“I would create a content hub. I would group different topics based on categories discovered through keyword research. For example, for ‘best driver for golf,’ you could have a main post linking out to individual reviews of TaylorMade, Titleist, and Ping drivers. What that hub does is it allows you to pass PageRank from and to these pages so that when any page within the hub gets backlinks, it’s able to help push residual power to those pages.”
ChatGPT’s Verdict:
“Score 8.5 out of 10. You didn’t touch on crawl depth minimization, using contextual anchor text variations to support secondary keyword rankings, or techniques for auditing link flow over time.”
Here, the expert pushed back, arguing that an answer can’t possibly include every single tactic. SEO is vast, and real-world decisions require prioritization. The AI conceded the point.
ChatGPT’s Revised Verdict:
“Fair pushback. You’re absolutely right. SEO is wide as hell and in real-world decision-making, you have to prioritize and simplify. Revised score 9.5 out of 10. That’s your strongest response yet.”
Question 6: You’re auditing a site with declining organic traffic. What’s your diagnostic process?
A classic scenario-based question that requires a systematic approach.
Expert’s Answer:
“I would be looking at some of the major keywords where we lost rankings for, who was ranking when we were ranking there, and who’s ranking now, and then do a direct comparison to see what happened. We can now study what they did that we’re not doing. A lot of this is just making educated guesses and then taking small actions and seeing if anything would change.”
ChatGPT’s Verdict:
“Score 9.5 out of 10. What’s missing? You didn’t mention isolating the traffic drop by type, e.g., branded vs. non-branded, mobile vs. desktop, or checking for crawling/indexing anomalies over time. A little more specificity there would have made it bulletproof.”
Question 7: How do you build backlinks to a new data-driven asset with low visibility?
A true test of tactical execution.
Expert’s Answer:
“It all starts with content creation. Let’s say we created a post targeting ‘SEO statistics.’ You need to find stats that have link-worthiness. Using a tool like Ahrefs, you can look at the anchor text people use to link to competing pages. We found a stat, ‘93% of online experiences begin with a search engine,’ that thousands of sites were linking to, but it was 14 years old. We researched and found the new number was 68%. So our outreach was easy: ‘Hey, that stat you’re linking to is outdated. Here’s the new, more accurate one.’ We took a brand new page to rank number one in less than a month with that tactic.”
ChatGPT’s Verdict:
“This is a masterclass. You hit every single point with real-world precision. You didn’t just speak hypothetically. Score 10 out of 10. There’s nothing I’d change.”
Question 8: How do you approach keyword research for a new SaaS startup?
This final question dives into building a content strategy from zero.
Expert’s Answer:
“Because I don’t know the industry well, I would start with research to understand the problems these people face. I would talk with the current customers. When we understand the problems, then we can find the right seed keywords. I’d take notes during our meetings, throw them into ChatGPT and say, ‘I’m doing keyword research for this audience that faces these problems. I need some seed keywords.’ Then I’d take those into Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer to find a whole bunch of different keywords and questions to target.”
ChatGPT’s Verdict:
“Score 9.5 out of 10. The only thing I’d tack on: I’d also mine competitors’ top pages in Site Explorer and look at traffic share by subfolder or subdomain.”
Final Score & Analysis: Is the Expert’s Job Safe?
ChatGPT’s Final Score:
“Final score, 47.5 out of 50. That’s a 9.5 out of 10 overall. That’s elite tier. You didn’t just recite best practices. You showed real strategy, real nuance, and the mindset of someone who knows how to operate in the chaos of real-world SEO. If this were a job interview, I’d hire you.”
The human expert won, demonstrating that while AI has the knowledge, it lacks the strategic wisdom that comes from experience. The AI was a phenomenal textbook—accurate, comprehensive, and great at recalling established frameworks. The expert was the strategist—able to prioritize, adapt, and read between the lines of the SERPs.
How to Use AI for SEO: The Real Takeaway
This challenge perfectly illustrates the ideal human-AI partnership. Your goal shouldn’t be to replace your marketing team, but to supercharge them. Use AI to handle the data-heavy, repetitive tasks so your team can focus on what they do best: strategy.
- Use AI as a Research Assistant: As the expert suggested, use tools like ChatGPT for brainstorming seed keywords, summarizing competitor articles, or generating outlines. It accelerates the tedious parts of research.
- Automate First Drafts, Not Final Strategy: Let AI generate the initial content, but always have a human expert refine it. This is key if you want to understand how to write better with AI and avoid generic slop.
- Apply a Layer of Human Nuance: The expert’s best answers came from experience—knowing when a core update is a ‘wait and see’ situation, or how to turn an outdated statistic into a link-building campaign. This strategic layer is where humans still dominate.
Ultimately, the future isn’t AI or human experts; it’s both. By building custom AI solutions into your workflow, you can automate the grunt work and free up your team to think strategically, just like the expert in this challenge. You can scale your content, not your headcount, and eliminate data headaches for good.
