Bankrate Stopped Using AI to Write Articles

Nick Nolan
5 min readSep 13, 2023
Image via Unsplash+ | Getty Images

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.

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Nick Nolan
Nick Nolan

Written by Nick Nolan

Freelance marketing consultant | Writing about Copywriting, SEO, and Social Media