Product description text is a major challenge in the vaping industry — especially for vape shops with very large product selections. You could have hundreds of products that you need to add to your site before you can even start doing business, and that represents an enormous volume of work. That’s why some e-commerce platforms like Shopify have added automatic AI product description generators. Considering the huge amount of time you’d save, there’s going to be a strong temptation to get your product descriptions done the easy way – but are AI product descriptions good for SEO?

In my time in the SEO business, I have written tens of thousands of product descriptions. All of the work was done by hand, and I strongly believe that there’s no substitute for human-created content.

AI-based product description generators represent a new development in e-commerce, though, so let’s examine the potential implications.

• Is using an AI product description generator good or bad for SEO? (Short answer: It’s usually bad.)
• Are there any successful vape sites that use AI for their product descriptions? (Short answer: Yes, but those sites have something you may not have.)

Let’s dig in with a little information about why product descriptions are so important in the first place.

Why Is Product Description Text So Important?

Product description text is absolutely crucial for any e-commerce site. Without description text, your product pages probably won’t rank for anything – and even if potential customers did manage to find a page with no text, they probably wouldn’t buy the product.

• In terms of on-site SEO, product pages might be the most important pages on your entire website because they’re the pages that are most likely to convert traffic into sales. People who come to your product pages from Google are very likely to become customers if the pages are well optimized, so you should put in extra effort here instead of looking for shortcuts.
• Good product descriptions are also a crucial part of providing a good customer experience. Product descriptions persuade people to buy and also explain the type of experience they’ll have when they do buy. A good description helps to close the deal and ensures that the buyer will be happy and satisfied.

What’s Good About AI Product Description Generators?

So, an AI product description generator promises to solve the above problems by doing the typing for you, so you can just publish your product pages and wait for the money to come rolling in; that’s the promise, anyway.

In reality, you’ll probably be waiting a long time for the money. I’ll explain why shortly. AI-generated product descriptions are useful in two cases, though, and it’s worthwhile to consider using an AI product text generator if you’re in one of these situations.

You Have a Strong Existing Brand

If you have a strong existing brand, people are going to find you online with or without Google’s help – and in that case, you don’t necessarily need your product pages to rank because the only thing you care about is ranking for search terms including your own brand name.

The Mike Tyson and Dennis Rodman vape brands both use AI for their product text. Their product pages generally don’t rank for anything, and that’s completely fine because they rely solely on branded search terms to generate all of their traffic. If you’re in that type of situation – and you don’t care about the fact that your product pages will probably receive little to no organic traffic – there’s no reason not to use AI-generated product descriptions.

Keyword rankings and graphs courtesy of AHREFS.

You’re Using AI Product Text Temporarily

Another valid reason for using AI product text is because you’re only planning to do so temporarily while you build out the rest of your site. There’s nothing wrong with using placeholder text on a temporary basis, and you can simply go back and replace the AI-generated text later when you have the time.

What’s Bad About AI Product Descriptions?

In the two cases that I described above, you can use AI product descriptions with no major drawbacks for SEO. Your product pages aren’t likely to rank for anything, but that doesn’t matter because it’s only temporary or because you only care about ranking for searches that include your brand name.

For just about everyone else, though, using an AI product description generator is a bad idea. Here are the two biggest reasons why.

The Quality of the Text May Be Poor

The biggest problem with AI-generated text is that the quality is generally poor. AI text is grammatically correct, but it often meanders without saying much of anything. When an AI text generator does say something of substance, it’s often wrong. AI chatbots confidently state things that are factually incorrect on a regular basis; these events are called hallucinations.

In order to get a product description from an AI text generator that isn’t completely generic, you’ll need to provide the specifications or features of the product. Between the time spent on typing product specs and fact-checking the results, you could just have written the text yourself.

In general, AI-generated text is a very poor experience for users. Google can see the type of experience that people have when they visit your website, and they’ll adjust your rankings accordingly. I’ll explain that in further detail shortly.

The Content Won’t Be Unique

The other major problem with using AI for your product descriptions is that the text won’t be truly original; it’ll just be a regurgitation of what’s in the AI’s training data. Anyone else who requests a description for the same product is going to get virtually the same text. This is one reason why websites that rely heavily on AI text never seem to earn sustainable rankings. You probably won’t be the first person to have typed a given prompt, and you almost certainly won’t be the last. Duplicate content is a serious no-no if you care about your search rankings.

Let’s do a little experiment. Suppose I’m in charge of the Rodman vape brand, and I’m going to use AI to create description text for one of their flavors. How close will my description be to the one on the actual Rodman site?

I tried doing descriptions for the Cool Mint flavor. Here’s the prompt I used:

Here’s how similar the output is to the actual text used on the Rodman site:

According to the text comparison tool on GoTranscript.com, the text that I got from ChatGPT was 88 percent similar to the original text – and this was on my first try. That should scare just about anyone away from using AI for product descriptions.

What Happens to Websites that Rely on AI for Their Content?

Over the long term, I’ve never seen a website get sustainable organic traffic if it relied on AI for its content. Here’s what ended up happening to three AI-based websites that I’ve monitored recently.

In one case, the site’s content was so bad that Google deindexed it entirely – the site peaked at more than a million monthly visitors and was then wiped out overnight. In the other two cases, the decline was more gradual. The end result, however, is always the same. Every AI-based website I’ve ever monitored has ultimately ended up losing most or all of its traffic.

Why does this happen? It’s because Google analyzes user behavior – both on its own search engine and across the web using the Chrome browser – to determine what types of experiences people are having when they visit websites. AI-based websites initially earn high rankings because their content seems to be relevant. Once enough users have voted with their “Back” buttons, though, the traffic always drops.

Building a website with AI might be a good plan if you intend to abandon the site when the traffic drops, but it’s not such a good idea if you want to build anything sustainable.

What Makes a Good Product Description?

Creating text descriptions by hand for a vape site with many products is an enormous amount of work, and that’s exactly why many people are tempted to use AI description generators instead. The text is done instantly, and you can move on to bigger things.

As I’ve explained in this article, though, using AI-based product text isn’t the way to achieve sustainable results unless you already have a strong brand and only care about ranking for search terms that include your brand name.

The good news, though, is that writing product description text really isn’t that hard. You also don’t have to be an amazing writer, although the text should obviously be free of any issues with spelling and grammar.

If you’re not sure to write, just focus on answering these questions.

• What is the product?
• What does the product do, or what problem does it solve?
• How does the product work?
• What are the product’s features and specifications?
• What does the product include, and what additional accessories or replacement parts does it require?
• Who should buy the product?
• If the product isn’t right for the person viewing it, what are some other alternatives to consider?

If you’ve answered all of the above questions, I can virtually guarantee that your description text is useful and helpful – and if you’re still stuck, don’t hesitate to reach out for help.