AI is Killing Creativity — and SEO Agencies Are Handing the Knife

By Jesus Arias, SEO Director

There was a time when SEO meant understanding humans — what they cared about, what they feared Googling from the office, and what made them click “read more.” It was half psychology, half empathy, and a sprinkle of analytics. Now? It’s become a game of “how to sound like ChatGPT without sounding like ChatGPT.”

Let’s be real: the AI gold rush didn’t just reshape SEO — it flattened it. Agencies that once talked about storytelling and strategy now talk about “scalable content ecosystems.” Translation: we found a way to make 300 identical blog posts in the time it used to take to write one thoughtful piece.

They promised clients “smarter workflows,” “faster production,” “AI-driven creativity.” What they actually delivered? A tsunami of polite, hollow paragraphs that sound like they were written by an intern with Grammarly Premium and an existential crisis.

Speed Isn’t Strategy

Everywhere you look, agencies are flexing on quantity.
“100 blog posts per week.”
“50 optimized landing pages.”
“2000 meta descriptions by Tuesday.”

It sounds impressive until you realize it’s the literary equivalent of fast food. Sure, it’s quick and consistent — but eat enough of it and your brain starts to atrophy.

When everyone can publish 100 articles a day, no one stands out. You don’t get differentiation; you get duplication. The internet becomes one giant SEO grey goo.

German brands, of all people, should know this. Efficiency is a virtue when you’re building cars — not when you’re building trust. You can automate a gearbox. You can’t automate sincerity.

SEO was never meant to be about volume. It was about value. The kind that comes from perspective, experience, and having something — anything — worth saying. Value doesn’t emerge from a prompt box. It comes from friction, from time, from the human messiness that machines still can’t fake.

The agencies chasing speed think they’re optimizing. In reality, they’re training audiences to ignore them faster.

The Myth of “AI Content Quality”

Agencies love that comforting line: “We use AI, but there’s always a human in the loop.”
That human, let’s be honest, is usually a junior editor correcting commas in an AI-generated paragraph at 4:52 PM on a Friday, wondering if “delve” is too pretentious for the fifth time in one article.

AI doesn’t make your content good. It makes your mediocrity scalable. It’s like having an espresso machine that brews bland coffee faster. The speed is real; the soul is gone.

The algorithm doesn’t care about your 2,000 words, your meta tags, or your keyword density spreadsheet from 2016. It cares whether your content actually helps someone. And when everything becomes machine-written, “helpful” quietly dies — replaced by recycled advice and SEO clichés.

We’ve entered a new era of content déjà vu. Articles quoting other AI articles that quoted other AI articles, until the source material is just digital inbreeding. The snake is officially eating its own tail.

Search Engines Are Getting Smarter — and They’re Laughing at Us

The irony is delicious. Google’s new AI-driven systems — SGE, Overviews, Gemini integrations — are now trained to detect and downrank the exact kind of formulaic, surface-level text that AI generators produce by default.

In other words: we’re using AI to produce the kind of content that Google’s AI is built to ignore.
It’s SEO cannibalism.

This isn’t innovation. It’s auto-sabotage with a dashboard.

The tools that promised to “revolutionize marketing” have turned many agencies into factories of fluff. And Google, in the most poetic twist possible, is quietly punishing them for it.

Humans Were Never the Problem

The “AI will replace writers” narrative was always a misdiagnosis. Humans weren’t too slow — agencies were too impatient. They didn’t want creativity; they wanted consistency. They didn’t want storytelling; they wanted templates.

Instead of empowering writers, they weakened them. Instead of building brand voices, they built prompt libraries.

Now the web is full of websites that rank for nothing, say nothing, and mean nothing. They’re like ghost towns made of bullet points and generic subheadings.

The tragedy? The internet used to feel like a conversation. Now it feels like a PowerPoint presentation no one asked for.

So What’s Left?

The agencies that survive this won’t be the ones producing more. They’ll be the ones who still know how to feel.

They’ll understand brands the way good writers understand characters — their quirks, contradictions, the things that make them human. They’ll write for people who don’t fall for “AI-powered insights” and “actionable synergies.” Those people have been burned before. They crave something real, even if it’s imperfect.

Let AI take care of the boring stuff — outlines, data parsing, keyword mapping. But let humans handle what machines still can’t: voice, irony, empathy, perspective.

Automation should make room for creativity, not replace it. The moment it replaces it, you’re not automating progress — you’re automating boredom.

This isn’t an anti-AI rant. It’s a reminder that AI is supposed to amplify creativity, not amputate it.

Final Thought (AI irony)

There’s a German term for this obsession with efficiency: Effizienz-Wahn. The cult of optimization. It’s brilliant when you’re manufacturing BMWs. But when you apply it to storytelling, it kills the soul faster than a broken meta tag.

Maybe the next big SEO trend won’t be about prompts, tokens, or model updates. Maybe it’ll be about something wildly underrated in 2025: meaning. Because in the end, creativity dies the moment we stop caring — and no algorithm update will ever fix that.