Is AI Creating Content Debt? Ways to Protect Your Website

You have heard the phrase “Content is King” a million times before. But, do you know who the king slayer is? It’s none other than content debt!

Think for a second. What drives traffic to your site? Which aspect of the website do your visitors engage with? And what makes you stand out in the market?

You guessed it right. It is content. Hence, content optimization is a necessary task for businesses.

But what’s content debt?

Let’s explore more about this and more in this blog.

What is Content Debt for Businesses?

Every business develops content faster than it can maintain it. For instance, websites leave old campaigns and outdated product pages live, and search engines index them.

Plus, more than one team publishes similar content without even realizing it. These content pieces pile up, eventually turning into content debt.

A vast, unstructured, outdated, and unmanaged content stack accumulates, negatively affecting the websites.

What is content debt?

It refers to the accumulation of unstructured, outdated, low-quality, and unmanaged content across business platforms.

“Content debt is the hidden cost of not managing the creation, maintenance, utility, and usability of digital content.” — Meridel Walkington, Senior UX Content Strategist at Mozilla.

Content debt is borrowed from the concept of technical debt. Technical debt occurs when businesses push software with outdated code and neglect best practices. This causes problems later on in the software.

What is Digital Decay?

Digital decay is the degradation or loss of digital information. This is due to content that is inaccessible, unreadable, or irrelevant. Digital decay is caused by a variety of factors, including outdated content and formats, broken links, bit rot (data corruption), and mismanagement.

Experts call this the Digital Dark Age, in which digital content vanishes from the web, affecting research and history. Let’s look at a Pew Research report.

As a part of their assessment, they collected around 1 million webpages from Common Crawl‘s archives. Common Crawl is an archive that periodically collects snapshots of the internet.

For the assessment, the samples considered were between 2013 and 2023 (which were around 90,000 pages annually). They then checked if the webpages still exist.

The analysis found that 25% of all webpages and their content were no longer accessible. From the 2013 snap, 38% of all the content was no longer accessible a decade later. Surprisingly, 1 out of 5 webpages from the 2021 snap became inaccessible just 2 years later.

This is called digital decay. Digital decay can result from increasing content and technical debt.

Note: The data here is for all webpages, including government, Wikipedia, and news websites.

This digital decay isn’t seen only in webpages; even social media digital decay can be found in the report.

Here, for the analysis, X (formerly Twitter) was taken. It found out:

• 1 of 5 tweets is no longer available (even after just 5 months of posting)

• 60% of the time, the above happened because the account was made private, and 40% time, the holder deleted the tweet

• A pattern was seen in which more than 40% of tweets in Arabic or Turkish were no longer available (within just 3 months)

• Tweets from default profiles were more likely to disappear

However, the social media digital decay in X was not just due to content debt but also connected to moderation.

Before exploring the rise of AI in content marketing and SEO, we need to examine its role in content development.

The Rise of AI in SEO and Content Marketing

AI is everywhere. And it’s being used for more than just textual content. It is now at the forefront of other content avenues, such as image or video generation.

One of the most famous initiatives of AI content development can be seen in Coca-Cola’s Masterpiece.

This video was indeed a masterpiece which blended creative art with Gen AI. It made extensive use of Generative AI for VFX, especially Stable Diffusion (Image Generator). The AI model helped the bottle transition from one art style to another. The campaign had massive global success. But Gen AI doesn’t always work for content development.

Another Coca-Cola campaign in 2024 faced severe backlash for its lack of creativity. Users worldwide called it a Soulless video.

The video was an AI-generated Christmas Promotional Ad (later removed).

According to NBC, the criticism mainly came from creatives. They said that using AI for content creation was distasteful and an insult to artists.

FUN FACT: @CocaCola is ‘red’ because it’s made from the blood of out-of-work artists! #HolidayFactz.

Sometimes AI content development works, and sometimes it doesn’t.

The text-generation capabilities of AI have advanced significantly in recent years. Advanced AI tools like GPT-4 have demonstrated AI’s ability to produce human-like text. For writers and content creators, Gen AI platforms like these help in creating blogs, articles, and sometimes creative pieces.

However, the text generation is Human-Like, not Human. Because of Gen AI’s lack of emotional resonance and reliance on trained data, these platforms can’t produce unique, authentic pieces.

If you want to learn more about the difference between AI-generated and Human text content creation, you can check out: The Blurred Line Between Human and AI-Generated Writing.

So, AI, or Gen AI, helps content marketers. These tools can be leveraged in content marketing to ideate content that resonates with the users. But originality always plays a crucial role.

What is the Role of AI in Content Marketing and SEO?

AI handles time-consuming, repetitive tasks in content marketing. Tasks like keyword research, ideation, and drafting are handled by AI, so that the marketers can focus on creativity and strategy.

AI is extremely valuable in content marketing, as it reduces the time required to publish content. Marketers use AI to:

• Automate tasks (repetitive)

• Discover insights from data that can optimize the content

• Personalize the content based on the target audience.

• Maintain consistent content efforts.

When it comes to SEO, AI helps in predictive analysis. Content marketing and SEO go hand in hand. And every marketer out there knows the importance of SEO in creating content.

With AI, SEO has shifted from a reactive to a predictive approach.

Formerly, the marketers used to optimize the content for search engines based on content performance. This is a reactive method to improve SEO efforts.

Today, AI helps in forecasting SEO trends before they even hit the market. This allows content marketers to create content that is relevant today and in the future.

How does Unchecked AI Usage Lead to Content Debt?

While it’s true that AI helps with content marketing and SEO, excessive use can lead to content debt.

Suppose you launch your website. When it’s new, you can easily manage your content, including blogs, website content, or product descriptions. AI can help you with these effectively.

However, once your business and website start to scale, managing and updating content could become haphazard. So, you resort to creating AI content that lacks any creativity or unique insight. These irrelevant and mismanaged content pieces lead to a non-functional content stack.

This leads to content debt. This can happen for reasons such as a lack of resources or failing to gauge the importance of the content and its consequences if mismanaged.

What are the consequences of content debt?

• Poor UX: Poor content quality can cause users to abandon your site in an instant. Inconsistent and unclear website content reduces engagement, resulting in a high bounce rate.

• AI in SEO: It is an established fact that Search Engines like Google prefer well-researched, informative content. So, poorly written or outdated AI-generated content can affect your website’s rankings.

• Reputational Damage: A site with outdated, low-quality content can signal to users that your business isn’t credible. Users can’t trust your company if they feel this way, which can damage your business’s reputation.

• Growth Challenges: Even if you start addressing this debt, it will take a long time and significant resources to pay it off. This will take off your valuable resources, restricting your business’s growth.

How to Protect Your Website Strategy from Content Debt?

You have to account for content debt even before launching your website. This will prevent you from falling into the trap and losing essential resources.

But this debt can be paid off even after you have already accumulated it. It doesn’t matter whether you are looking to revamp your website or simply seeking ways to manage your site’s content; there are ways to pay off the content debt.

“We think carefully about the content we create and try not to produce pieces of content that are essentially single-use. We want longer-term value,” Stephen Zorio, Editor at Amazon Science, said at a webinar.

1. Conducting a Comprehensive Audit

Some of your content (even AI) will work, and some won’t. Therefore, keeping track of what’s working for you and what isn’t will make all the difference. For that, a content audit will help.

Once you have an idea of what content resonates with users, you can further optimise it with AI. A comprehensive audit can also help you identify dead weight and remove irrelevant or outdated content from your website.

2. CMS Evaluation

According to a survey, 4 out of 10 digital marketers were dissatisfied with their CMS performance. Once you complete a comprehensive content audit, you need to check whether your content management system can effectively handle the assets.

You have to ask these questions to decide if your CMS is suitable to prevent content debt:

• Can I revise and preview content on my CMS?

• Can I assess or assign metadata?

• Can I sunset time-bound licensed pieces or campaigns?

• Can my team collaborate and manage libraries in the CMS if needed?

3. Active Management of Content

To eliminate AI-generated content debt, you will need to develop a clear strategy for content development and management. In that strategy, you have to:

• Determine the indicators of success

• Assign responsibilities among departments

• Evaluate content goals

These are the steps one can take to improve their site’s efficiency and adopt a more pragmatic content management approach.

Maintaining Content Health: The Effective Way of Content Optimization

If content debt is the symptom, then content health is the condition of your digital ecosystem. There isn’t a formal definition of content health. It is dependent on the business and what they consider healthy for their site.

What is Content Health?

It’s the structure, scalability, and accuracy of the content across all distribution channels. It is not about the quantity of content but about its quality, which helps it perform, adapt, and remain aligned with business objectives.

What are the Characteristics of a Healthy Content Ecosystem?

• The content is easy to maintain

• They are flexible to update

• The content is consistent

• The asset should have a clear structure, goal, and owner

• It can respond to changes quickly

• The content can easily scale without much chaos

What are the 5 Main Pillars of Good Content Health?

1. Accuracy: Good content health generally starts with having accuracy. The content of your website should reflect updated data, brand tone, and messaging, even if it’s crafted by AI. This way, the AI-driven and conventional search engines can trust your content.

If you want to know more about creating content for emerging SEO like GEO (Generative Engine) and AEO (Answer Engine), you can check out: GEO vs SEO: The Ultimate Battle for Web Traffic Dominance.

2. Structure: The element that transforms individual content pieces into flexible ecosystems. If the content is modular, teams can adapt it to markets, campaigns, and channels without restructuring it.

3. Accessibility: There is no point in creating content if machines or humans can’t find it. Clear hierarchy, alt texts, metadata, semantic formatting, and so on make sure that the content is accessible and discoverable by AI-powered search engines.

4. Accountability: You also have to provide accountability for the content you produce. This practice ensures good content health. For that, AI content (generic) won’t work. Practical insights and actionable guides from domain experts make the content more authentic.

5. Performance: If you can track your content’s performance, you can maintain good content health in your site ecosystem. This way, you can easily identify the lapses and successes of the content you’re publishing.

An exceptional content health can improve your website. You can have:

• The expected visibility in search engines

• Increased reputation

• Personalization

• Discoverability by AI algorithms

On the other hand, poor content health is an indicator of an increasing content debt. Without maintenance, structure, and required governance, even your best strategy will turn into a digital disaster.

In a nutshell, you can’t have good content health if you can’t eliminate content debt or can’t pay off the debt you already have on your site.

Why Is Content Debt Harmful in AI Search?

AI search is on the rise. According to Statista’s estimates, Gen AI search is supposed to reach over 36 million users in the US by 2026.

However, these AI-driven search engines, such as AI Overviews, Perplexity, and ChatGPT, no longer rely on keyword density. All they care about is intent (reliability and context), and they rank content from Gen AI or Answer Engines based on that.

So, if a business has a large content debt, it sends inconsistent signals, making it harder for AI algorithms to distinguish reliable information from this content.

What are the things on a website that indicate content debt?

• Old campaigns that don’t align with the brand tone or messaging anymore

• Duplicate articles and blogs

• Irrelevant content that harms the topical authority and E-E-A-T

• Outdated content

• Poorly-structured content pieces

• Lack of expertise can also hurt the E-E-A-T

Do you want to learn about E-E-A-T and topical authority? Here’s something to check out: How to Build Topical Authority with EEAT to Boost Rankings.

Just like your health, you cannot treat the symptoms (content debt) without identifying the cause (content health).

Deleting pages or doing an audit won’t help much. Without ownership, structure, and consistent maintenance, the content debt will never be paid off. It will return, and in the worst way possible.

Striking the Right Balance between AI and Human Content

For older websites, content debt is inevitable. However, how you manage it makes all the difference.

You have to remember that AI is there to help you create content, but over-reliance on it can lead to catastrophic consequences for your site. And, prioritizing a healthy content strategy can help you manage this debt issue.

Improving content structure, consistency, maintenance, and ownership can help you prevent debt accumulation in the first place.

So, content debt is a vital part of your content health. The weaker your content health, the more debt there is. And, the stronger the health is, the easier it is to prevent and control it.

Do you want to learn more about how to pay off your content debt? We are here for you.

Book a call with Webskitters and make your content healthy.

FAQs

1. What is content debt?

Content debt is the accumulation of outdated, duplicate, low-quality, and unmanaged content across digital platforms.

2. How does content debt affect SEO?

It sends inconsistent signals to search engines, reducing rankings, visibility, and topical authority.

3. What causes content debt in businesses?

Rapid content creation, poor maintenance, siloed teams, and excessive AI-generated content without strategy.

4. How is content debt linked to digital decay?

Unmanaged content becomes inaccessible, irrelevant, or broken over time, leading to digital decay.

5. Can AI help reduce content debt?

Yes, when used strategically for audits, optimization, and insights—but unchecked AI usage can worsen it.