Bankrate Stopped Using AI to Write Articles
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Bankrate.com was making headlines in January because they were openly publishing 100s of AI-written articles.
I studied their results and wrote this article.
Google has always said they have strict guidelines about YMYL (your money, your life) topics, which is most of Bankrate’s content. From what I saw, Bankrate’s articles were doing well. Many of them were ranking on the 1st page of search results.
AI was also a small portion of their content strategy.
In one day, Bankrate published 41 new articles and used AI to write 3 of them. They were testing AI content without going all in — and the results seemed promising.
Today, I checked back in to see how it was going.
It turns out that Bankrate has ditched their AI content production.
They included this disclaimer at the top of their AI-assisted articles:
“This article was generated using automation technology and thoroughly edited and fact-checked by an editor on our editorial staff.”
That makes it easy to find their AI articles. with a quick Google search. When I checked, Bankrate published a total of 213 — only 45 more than when I wrote the first article in January.
I also saw that they’ve only published 1 AI-assisted article after January 2023.
212 of the articles were published in 2022 or January 2023. Only 1 article with the disclaimer was published in July 2023.
Maybe they stopped using the disclaimer?
Now that using AI tools is more accepted, maybe Bankrate stopped putting it on their new content. Google said using AI tools is fine, as long as the content is valuable.
That’s a possibility, but I don’t think it’s the case here.
Bankrate hasn’t removed the disclaimer from their older AI-assisted articles, so I don’t see why they wouldn’t include it on their new articles if they were actually using AI tools to do the heavy lifting.
