AI Watermarking: What Matters for Law Firm SEO

In this episode of AI SEO for Law Firms, John McDougall of McDougall Interactive explores AI watermarking, content credentials, and AI detection tools. He shares an HVAC client example to explain the risks of thin, mass-produced content and the work involved in cleaning it up. He also discusses why firsthand experience, information gain, and original podcasts and videos matter more than lightly editing AI-generated copy.

John McDougall: Hey, it’s John McDougall and welcome to AI SEO for Law Firms. And today we’re talking about AI and watermarking. There’s a lot of buzz in the industry right now about AI watermarks and if that’s going to hurt you because Google will suddenly see that you have AI content. The key here is that it’s not so critical if Google knows that you used AI content. It’s critical that Google sees that you made a solid effort to adjust your content if you’re using AI.

And really it’s something like, I think, 92% of people are using AI in their marketing now, according to Orbit Media, who has a great yearly blogger survey. So it’s like 8% of people are not using AI. So if a watermark is the death knell of your content marketing, basically 92% of people are dead. So let’s go over some of the key features, the things that you need to understand and things that you don’t need to worry about; some of the myths.

Watermarks, Content Credentials, and AI Detection

So number one, what is a watermark? One is Google SynthID. It’s an imperceptible signal woven directly at file generation. So sure, it will tell Google, tell a search engine, a large language model, that this content was created with AI, but it doesn’t tell them how much was AI content. And Google doesn’t flag that content immediately as bad content just because AI was involved in it.

And then there’s provenance and content credentials like C2PA, which is like a nutritional label attached to the outside of a file and it provides a verifiable audit trail detailing the exact camera, software, AI model or timestamp used to create or edit the media.

And lastly, there’s AI detection and outside algorithms. Most of you will probably have heard of originality.ai for this, to judge how much of your content is in fact AI or plagiarized. Originality has a bunch of features in it, but two big ones are how much is perceived by their algorithm as AI generated and how much is stolen, plagiarized, or just mistakenly duplicated.

AI Watermarks and Search Penalty Concerns

So those are three technologies to be aware of. For the most part in the last couple years, I think originality.ai type of tools were the big thing on people’s minds, until recently when Anthropic came out with the announcements about AI watermarking. And now the internet’s sort of in a panic. But the funny part about that is you shouldn’t be in a panic if you’re doing good things with your content, even if you’re using AI in the process. So that’s the most critical takeaway. There’s no automatic search penalty if you have an AI watermark and you should not worry [about removing] that watermark.

There are software tools that have been developed now, like watermark remover, watermark eraser or whatever. I don’t know what the names are, that might be a good name, watermark eraser, but I’m not buying those. I’m not worrying about those. I would not lose sleep over those.

Using AI for Research Instead of Automated Writing

I think in the future it would be useful for this to evolve to where it’s very transparent where the search engines can see how much AI was used, how it was used, and agencies and writers can all use those tools so that, if they were very effective, I would rely on them. And we tell our writers, “you’ll be fired if you use AI” in a way that is like pushing the easy button, like “write an article”. We absolutely use AI in the process. And again, 92% of people are using AI at some level.

And I think smart agencies are leveraging the intelligence of AI to come up with research, competitive analysis, topic gap analysis. There are awesome things that AI is great at. But the key is you shouldn’t be trying to just lightly edit your AI content and call it a day. That’s still AI slop.

And you shouldn’t be worried, if you just use AI to do a grammar check, that you’re going to have a watermark and that’s going to cause a problem. So there are things that people are overly focused on, that you don’t need to worry about.

Thin Location Pages and Scaled Content Abuse

What you do need to worry about, and I’ll share this through a story, I had an emergency call Monday with an HVAC client where we shared with them, they’re two or three months into working with us, and we audited their site like almost every client we get these days, and found tons of AI content. So like 150 to 200 service pages, ductless air conditioners in this town, ductless heating systems in this town, and then the same page for the next town, basically just copied with very minor edits, likely done with AI and done so quickly. There are even just grammatical mistakes.

So maybe in some ways the AI probably wouldn’t make those mistakes. So I think the human’s trying to quickly clean it up and they’re just doing a lame job of it. But anyway, huge amounts of service content that is AI generated, that’s a huge problem, and that will get you in trouble with Google. They are looking to penalize for scaled content abuse and commodity non-original content, not if AI was used, because again, everyone’s using AI. That would basically be a tough position for Google to take like, oh, anybody that uses AI, you’re toast. That’s just not going to fly.

So Google, in a way, from the beginning, I was concerned the way they phrased it. It was like, “Hey, we don’t care if you use AI. AI is great, just make good content.” And then I figured the problem with that, everyone’s going to go out off a cliff like Lemmings and just be like, “Oh, well, we could just use AI flat out.” And they did.

The Cost of Cleaning Up Low-Quality AI Content

And now we’re at a point where it’s gotten so ridiculous that that HVAC client has 150, 200 pages of thin, basic, crappy town pages. Even the case studies that they did when we actually met them a couple years ago and advised that they write case studies if they work with us. And they did that on their own for a couple of years, but we’re finding that those are also basically slop. So we have to have a cleanup and they want a weekly report showing how much we’re cleaning up of that.

The problem is they’re not at a price point where we can clean up 150 to 200 pages and then [write] 50 case studies. That’s like 200 to 250 pages and we’re doing weekly content. So they’re on a modest SEO program. So 250 pages could be like 250 weeks unless they increase the package with us.

So the key here is that those stories are so rampant that all of our new customers are coming with volumes of crappy, thin content and we have to correct that and work out a reasonable way to do that. Some people are going to freelancer.com and finding people to clean up slop, like just hiring writers now to clean up what they did poorly.

So I’m looking at Search Engine Journal here, AI slop cleanup, job listings up 87%. The report highlights listings for fixing AI output rose 87% to 10,760 listings according to the Guardian. Small companies, AI first passes, hit problems that they can’t fix. Freelancers say fixes take as much work as starting over and some refuse to do them.

And that’s kind of what I was just describing with our story. Our client is up in arms that, “oh my God, you just alerted us to this problem, but you got to fix it.”

And the crazy thing is it’s been two or three years of developing nine pages a month according to their contract with their last agency, and it’s all just crap. And so we have to go clean it up.

Why Light Editing Falls Short of E-E-A-T

So now if AI watermarks were on that content, would there be any difference? I don’t think any difference. An AI watermark on that isn’t going to change the fact that it’s good or bad content.

So the key here is you do have to worry about your use of AI, how you use it. You can’t just lightly edit stuff and call it a day. If in the old days it would take three, four hours to write an article, maybe now it takes two or three hours, but you should still spend two or three hours or so on an article, not 10 minutes cleaning it up and say, “Oh, we use AI, but we work on it, we really fix it.”

I think most people that we see are not really doing an adequate job to add EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness) so that it’s proven that your team, your writers, the authors of the content, actually have real experience and are trusted in the industry.

Information Gain and Firsthand Experience for SEO

And then the final takeaway here really for today, for this podcast, is not only that light editing is not enough, but the big win, if you want the magic bullet right now in SEO, is information gain. So not publishing craploads of content, that’s not the big win. Everybody’s doing that. So much so that that’s kind of basically more of a penalty or a red flag to Google now. The key is that Google rewards non-commodity content that provides firsthand experience, unique analysis, and information gain beyond common knowledge. So if a 30-second prompt can generate the content that you’re making, that’s not good content.

Original Podcasts and Videos for Law Firm Content

And we believe that “talk marketing”, our term for using podcasts and video content, interviews basically, with our clients — and ideally also at times with the influencers in their industry — that type of content almost can’t be beat. Google, even in their documentation — which is going to be one of my next podcasts about how Google says SEO is still a critical thing to do — just because people are trying to sell you some AI SEO doesn’t mean that the foundation of SEO isn’t still valid, and especially content like podcasts and videos and things like infographics, original data, that’s the stuff that’s going to turn Google on.

And if there’s a watermark on content like that on your podcast with the transcript, on your video, on your infographics, I’m not worried about that. I’m worried about, “is there information gain? Is there some unique human perspective that’s added to your content?”

And even if AI, which again, we don’t let our writers use AI in the full writing of content, but even if you did do that, go in and make sure that there’s unique perspective. It starts with your concepts from your actual experience and then you’ll be good whether there’s a watermark or not.

Thanks for joining me on AI SEO for Law Firms. Visit mcdougallinteractive.com for more information. Make sure to like and subscribe. And see you next time!