Does AI lead to AI slop?
Obviously AI generates the “slop” when asked, but why generate it in the first place?
AI has been blamed for a considerable drop in website traffic to blog posts, guides, and more. Even official utility sites, such as documentation, aren’t safe, with TailwindCSS reporting a 40% drop in traffic over the past couple of years.
As someone that helps customers with SEO and website analytics, I’ve seen the brutal gutting of content that once brought in thousands of views - now down as much as ~50%. While this is devastating to some sites that survived off of a few pillar blog posts, those in the content creation business have started running the numbers on how to recover.
One such solution that I’ve seen (and considered myself) is to pump out more content. Let’s take a common scenario where we expect say 3000 visits per month on a blog post. Well if that blog post now only generates 1000 visits per month - it stands to reason that making two more blog posts will bring our traffic back up to 3000 visits per month overall.
Okay, so now to get the same amount of traffic that we did before, we need three times the content - doable (for some)… but also time consuming. In fact it’s three times more time consuming - so how do we solve this problem? 🤔
In the past we could take a look at some classic efficiency improvements (ie better systems from draft to publish), or we could hire more people. But remember, that our website traffic has just been gutted and our revenue is in trouble… so getting the budget to hire more people is going to be a challenge.
So where does this lead us? Well… AI can write content right? Why don’t we give it a try, just this once? Oh! It just generated a well thought-out and SEO-friendly piece of content that only needs a small amount of tweaking - and it only took a few minutes!
So now you, as the website owner, have reached what I think is a fork in the road. Do we ignore this very efficient way of content generation? Or do we embrace this faster way to create content that is so efficient that we don’t have to stop at just three blog posts, we can generate six in the same amount of time and double our traffic (in theory).
This type of scenario(and many more like it), are why I’ve been thinking that AI itself has been leading to AI slop.
What do you think? Do you agree with Satya Nadella that the term AI slop shouldn’t be used? Do you use AI generated content on your website?

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AI-generated content proliferation stems from a vicious cycle: AI tools reduce organic traffic to websites by 40-50%, forcing content creators to produce 3x more content to maintain visitor numbers. With budgets constrained and time limited, creators turn to AI for efficient content generation, inadvertently contributing to the "AI slop" problem. This creates a dilemma between maintaining content quality and meeting traffic recovery demands through volume.

Why do we generate AI slop?