It's difficult to ignore the role AI is playing in everything, for better or worse. Every piece of software is incorporating their own version of AI (and charging us more), our friends on Facebook are generating goofy cartoons, Etsy is spammed with AI-slop disguised as "art".
But when it comes to owning a business, we're all thinking the same thing. "Can it make my day-to-day easier?"
We've been considering writing about AI's role for a while, but there never seemed to be a perfect time since the industry is evolving so quickly. Instead, we told ourselves what we tell our clients: Something is better than nothing!
AI is Not Killing SEO... Yet
First, let's do a quick recap of what SEO is... Search Engine Optimization is a strategy for optimizing your content so that search engines are more likely to show it to users who are searching for specific bits of information.
Secondly, AI is not killing SEO. It is, however, influencing how the algorithm processes information on your website, as well as how users are searching to begin with. Search engines have incorporated AI overviews to parse the top search results and create a summary that it thinks is relevant, linking to the sources it cites. Relevance is determined by certain SEO signals, but it does not guarantee the information is accurate.
People are also using Large Language Model (LLM) tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity to get information about something without going to a search engine because - ironically - they're hoping for access to quick and accurate information. (But remember, it's not necessarily accurate!)
So when a user does land on your website to read your content, it needs to be seen as valuable, and not just by Google. What's a small business to do? When it comes to writing content, focus on the E-E-A-T principle:
- Experience - Does the author have first-hand experience?
- Expertise - Is the author an expert in the subject?
- Authoritativeness - Does your brand continuously publish high quality content, or link to respected sites within the industry?
- Trustworthiness - Can the content be trusted?
In addition to content writing to help get your content seen by search engines, you should also stick to same ol' technical SEO tactics. The basics include:
- Semantic HTML (like using H1 and H2 headlines, or adding ALT text to images)
- META data (like giving your pages a proper title and description)
- Cross-link between different pages and posts
- SCHEMA markup (setting an FAQ up with the correct code so bots know it's in question-answer format)
Ranking for LLMs requires more than just general SEO work, so we'll touch on that next.
When it comes to leveraging SEO as a small business, just remember that the old rules of SEO still mostly apply... For now 🥲
So you want to rank on ChatGPT?
Next, let's build on the topic of AI's role in SEO by diving into ranking for LLMs.
People are turning to Large Language Models (LLMs) like Perplexity, ChatGPT and Claude hoping they'll get better information faster. LLMs make this possible by combining vast amounts of training data with the ability to query the Internet when needed to create a cohesive response. This means your strategy should be approached in two ways: getting included in the training data, and getting cited in real-time retrieval.
#1: Getting Included in Training Data
This is where SEO comes into play! Creating content still matters, but it needs to be genuine and authoritative. LLMs favor content that clearly answers a question from a place of expertise, which goes back to the E-E-A-T principle. This also means that generating blog posts using only AI can be counterproductive. (More on that to come later in this series!)
#2: Getting Cited in Real-Time Retrieval
LLMs are more likely to feature your website if authoritative sites, blogs, directories, and forums reference your business. Think guest posts, getting quoted as an expert, being listed in roundups, and reviews. As much content as you think you can produce regularly, you need other credible brands to post about you as well. There are LLM ranking signals in development. A working group has proposed an llm.txt file, similar to robots.txt, to indicate how AI should scrape information. However, it has not been consistently adopted. This means there's still no easy "Submit Your Site" button like there is for Google indexing in Search Console. So, what the heck should you do? Focus on high-value content. Make sure you have a platform to accept reviews. Then, take advantage of online partnerships, being featured on podcasts or guest posts, and adding more directory listings when you can!
Small businesses that focus on being genuinely useful and consistently present are already doing the right things, even without the motivation of ranking up in ChatGPT.
Are You Using AI as a Ghost Writer?
SEO remains a powerful strategy to help make your business website more visible on the web. Sure, the rules are evolving (see our previous post in this series), but creating authoritative content is still a part of it.
We get it. It's tempting - like, really tempting - to fully offload content creation to an AI tool like ChatGPT or Claude. (Because we can only write so many social media captions.) However, use these tools as a part of your process rather than relying on them as THE solution to your content strategy.
Here's how to do it:
- Step 1: Start with your SEO research and create an outline.
- Sep 2: Write a first - very rough - draft. Yes, YOU should write the first draft, not the bot.
- Step 3: Feed your rough draft into your AI of choice to help you flesh out your ideas.
- Step 4: Then, use AI's suggestions to iterate and create a second draft that's all your own. This step is crucial because it's where you can inject your brand's personality (voice and tone) into the copy, something AI cannot do as well without more thorough training.
Puh-lease don’t just generate and publish as-is. The bots will know if other bots wrote it. Search engines are cracking down on low-quality AI content and will penalize you accordingly. If you’re using AI-generated content, we want you to put a human touch on it! We tell our clients to "Write it 60% for humans, and 40% for robots."
Can AI make writing content easier? Sure! But, keep it genuine. Don't outsource it entirely and make AI your ghost writer.
AI Images: Always Count the Fingers
Let's talk about another role of using generative AI: imagery.
There are plenty of tools out there to generate images and video like Adobe Firefly, Nano Banana, ChatGPT Pro, and Midjourney. They all have their pros and cons: Almost all require some form of paid subscription to use it to its fullest extent, and each one will still accidentally create people with a random number of fingers on occasion. 😂
AI-generated images tend to have a distinct look and feel that make them recognizable. (As of today, ChatGPT sure does love to create warm-tone, 1950s style illustrations!) If you're mixing AI-generated images with Canva templates and professional photos, then you're going to lack brand cohesion. Even worse, your audience might scroll right past it because the style looks identical to what another brand posted yesterday. If you choose the AI image route, then be sure to share your brand identity with it first for inspiration. The goal is to maintain brand recognition.
But more important than the tools themselves (in our opinion) is asking yourself this question as a small business "How do my customers feel about AI?" The market is pretty split on AI adoption, which means that you risk losing them if you were to incorporate - or not be transparent about incorporating - AI in your business.
If you share AI-generated images with us for your website, we will accept them. But, we'll also make sure you know you're using generative AI. This isn't to shame you in any way, it's to make sure you understand what you're working with. We've had some instances where our client was not aware their stock image from Shutterstock was generated with AI. (Awkwardly, we've had this happen to us, too! But now we remember to check the "exclude AI images" filter.)
AI can generate an image in seconds, which can be extremely helpful for an overwhelmed business owner. Whether it looks like YOUR brand is a different question entirely.
What is Vibe Coding?
The term "vibe coding" has been floating around lately, especially within startups, tech spaces, and of course the bro videos on YouTube. At its core, vibe coding is the practice of using AI to generate code by describing what you want in plain language, rather than writing it yourself.
Honestly, it's pretty cool that this is even possible. (Wait, is this how some people felt when computers started becoming mainstream? Or even calculators?) Tools like Claude Code can help the average business owner spin up a data dashboard for website performance, or create a proof of concept for new functionality on their site.
Here's where it gets complicated...
That vibe-coded app makes for a FANtastic prototype, but it's nowhere near production ready. AI tools are only as good as the code they're trained on, which is often full of bugs and human assumptions. (Our favorite example is an app that stored passwords without any encryption🫠) Without a professional checking the work, there's a strong possibility that code you just "wrote" is full of vulnerabilities.
Another future concern relates to skill regression and job placement. We've heard first-hand stories from recent grads about how students primarily use AI to write their project code for them. So as more junior developers rely on AI to write code for them, the industry risks losing the foundational knowledge that produces experienced senior developers. Who will be in charge of reviewing and fixing broken code in the future if the skills aren't there?
Before you think it, these concerns do not come from a place of jealousy or fear of being replaced. We agree vibe coding is a great tool for exploring ideas. It is not a replacement for a developer when it comes to actually launching a feature on your website, app, or full-scale product. The vibes are immaculate. The security audit, less so.
Attack of the AI Bots
By the end of 2025, approx. 1 out of every 31 visits to a website were from AI bots.
Unlike human visitors who load a page or two and move on, AI bots crawl your site more aggressively. From a business standpoint, this can significantly increase server load without generating any actual business value. This sudden spike in traffic can slow your site down for real visitors, or even trigger overage charges causing you to pay more simply because AI was taking a look around.
As a business, you're also running the risk of your content being plagiarized (and misquoted). While it might seem nice for your business to be cited in a user's query, data shows these same users are only looking for quick answers, not to genuinely learn about your business or even become a customer. These interactions are referred to as "zero-click" answers because the user isn't clicking over to your site. This becomes a bigger issue as real-time LLM bots trying to answer user questions are rapidly increasing. If users are turning to ChatGPT first, but aren't converting, is it worth it?
Some hosting providers now offer the option to toggle AI bots on and off. Whether you choose to block them - or not - depends on your goals. If ranking for LLMs is important to your business, despite the lack of conversions, then keep the bots! If it's not, then it's worth the consideration of blocking them.
Regarding security, AI is making it easier to create cyberattacks as malware development has evolved from experimental into a common practice. However, the most relevant threat for small businesses is AI-generated phishing emails as they now appear more personalized and mimic the company's branding. (Our golden rule is to always look at the email address of who sent the email to begin with.)
The irony is that the same tools making your business more efficient are also creating more work to keep your website safe.
The Ethics of Using AI
We've all heard the analogy that a single ChatGPT prompt is the equivalent of consuming 1 bottle of water. (The science is now showing it's closer to 30mL.) Yes, AI requires water to function. However, that number hits different when you realize scrolling social media for one hour is equivalent of ~14 prompts worth of water, or that playing video games for one hour uses 200 prompts.
When you look at the bigger picture, ALL of our tech requires a lot of water to produce and operate it, an issue not solely limited to AI. Instead, the conversation should be focused on the overall environmental impacts of data centers. Data centers tend to be built in low-income communities, increasing utility costs and limiting fresh water for residents. They bring jobs too, but the problem is how they're being operated and regulated, not the data center itself.
Now let's shift the discussion to intellectual property. AI has been trained on creative work produced by people - often small businesses, artists, and authors - without compensation. The ability for someone to create an anime-themed social media graphic downplays the skill and effort it took for trained artists to refine that style in the first place.
This also raises questions around plagiarism. Who owns the content that generative AI creates? Currently, content generated solely by AI cannot be copyright protected in the US. If AI is being cited, or used in prototyping, then that's a little different. Thankfully, the legal landscape is actively evolving.
Finally, there is a growing gender gap in AI use. Not only are women adopting AI at a slower rate, but they're being scrutinized more when they do use AI. Results from a research study stated, "When reviewers thought a woman had used AI to write code, they questioned her fundamental abilities far more than when reviewing the same AI-assisted code from a man."
There's no doubt that there's a moral divide when it comes to using AI. From our perspective, we shouldn't blame the tool itself for its shortcomings. Instead, we should be looking toward the people building and funding AI to take all of our best interests into consideration.
How Pixel Jam is Using AI
With all of this talk about AI, it's only fair that we address how we use it as a tool in our business.
In short: We're not boycotting AI, but we're not going all-in either… Even though it's as tempting as the One Ring.
To start, we've been testing many of the different tools because we feel it's important to know what's available, how they work, and why other agencies might use them. Platforms like Claude Code and Wix now have AI generators that build websites for you. Figma and Canva offer AI-driven design tools. We've tried them to see how they work, and what they produce, but that doesn't mean we're incorporating them into our workflow.
Currently, we use AI to:
- Help us troubleshoot coding issues we're stuck on, like finding the missing semicolon in 20,000 lines of code.
- Grammar and spellcheck (mainly because it's baked into Google Workspace, and we can't turn it off).
- Generate code blocks based on our own logic systems and variables that we then go and adjust and test before implementing. This helps us make our programming process more efficient.
- Summarize and refine content to get up to speed more quickly when we receive a lot of information and content to process for a site build.
- Double-check our own SEO research prior to creating content to make sure we haven't missed anything.
And, just as important, here's what we're NOT using AI for:
- Writing blog posts from scratch and posting them verbatim.
- Vibe coding.
- Generating graphics, photos or videos. (It's been a challenge identifying which stock photo sites sneak AI images in without labeling them, as we've accidentally used a couple before educating ourselves more.)
We see how AI can help, but it's difficult to get past some of these ethical implications and the capitalist infrastructure behind it. Expectations within the industry are shifting, for better or worse, and we're figuring it out as we go. The difference is we're trying to do it mindfully.
Sources
- "Bots are taking over the internet and AI users are to blame" by Brandon Vigliarolo at The Register
- "AI & The Environment" series by Andy Masley
- "The Gender Gap In AI Use—And What’s Driving It, According To Lean In Survey" by Kim Elsesser via Forbes