Work Smarter, Not Harder: SEO Tasks You Should Use AI for Today
Ask any SEO why they love their job, and you'll probably hear something like, “It’s always changing,” or “I love getting to learn new things.” After 12 years managing organic search for local businesses and a few national brands, I feel the same. SEO keeps you on your toes, and that’s part of what makes it so much fun. But let’s be honest: a lot of the work can get repetitive and data-heavy. That’s why I’m a big fan of using AI to streamline my work whenever possible.
SEO is evolving, and the way we optimize our day-to-day tasks is too. It’s not here to replace us; it’s here to make us better. In other words: Don’t worry about AI taking your job; worry about not using it to its full potential.
Here are a few of the ways I use AI on the daily, and you can too. Of course, this list might be outdated by the time I’m done writing this, and that’s okay—I hope it is! But it’s a great starting point for anyone who wants to use AI to increase their own efficiency but isn’t sure where to start.
Redirect Mapping for Site Migrations
Redirect mapping is one of those tasks that’s both important and incredibly tedious. Luckily, AI can help speed things up. I use ChatGPT to match old URLs with their most relevant new counterparts during site migrations. While it still needs human intervention, this process takes a lot of the grunt work off my plate.
Here’s what you’ll need:
A list of old URLs
A list of new URLs
A site crawler (like Screaming Frog) to export them
Once you’ve got that, here’s how I use AI to streamline the process:
Export old and new URLs from your site crawls
Normalize the URLs by removing domains, dates, or query strings
Ask AI to perform a similarity analysis and suggest redirect pairs
For large datasets, have AI generate rule-based patterns for batch redirects
You’ll still need to review the results; delete any exact matches that don’t need redirects and double-check the rest. It’s not glamorous work, but with a little AI support, it does become a whole lot more manageable.
Creating & Reviewing Editorial Calendar Topics
If content planning is a core part of your SEO strategy (and it should be), AI can help you avoid keyword cannibalization and surface fresh ideas that resonate with your audience. The key to getting meaningful suggestions is simple: Context. The more detail you give the AI about your business/client, goals, and target audience, the less generic the output will be.
Here’s how I use AI for easier topic planning:
Provide context: Feed the AI your homepage copy, sitemap, personas, internal notes—anything that clarifies who you're trying to reach and what makes your site the best publisher of this information.
Generate ideas: Ask for a list of topic suggestions aligned with your SEO goals. Request more than you need so you can cherry-pick the strongest ones.
Cross-check for duplicates: Compare suggestions against existing content. You can even ask AI to do this using your sitemap URLs, if they’re descriptive enough. I typically give it my page or post XML sitemaps.
Eliminate overlap: Prompt AI to flag duplicate or overly similar topics. If you see a suggestion that already exists on your site, consider treating it as an opportunity to update or consolidate the existing page(s), if it could be better.
AI won’t replace your editorial instincts, but it can absolutely help you move faster and make smarter calls on what to write about.
Building Content Outlines from Competitor Data
When it comes to content that actually performs, planning matters. A decade ago, SEOs might’ve bragged about content being “keyword rich.” Today, Google doesn’t care about keywords; your content needst to be value-rich. AI can help you analyze what’s working for top-ranking competitors and build outlines that not only match their quality but improve on it.
Here’s how I use AI to build better content outlines:
Gather top-ranking URLs for your target keyword or intent (usually the top five are enough, assuming the content is solid).
Input the content into an AI tool and ask it to group key themes or subtopics.
Generate a hierarchical outline based on those grouped ideas.
Refine the outline using your own SEO knowledge (what important angles are your competitors missing?)
This approach can save time on manual analysis and helps ensure your content aligns with search intent from the start.
Writing Image Alt Text at Scale
Alt text is important for both accessibility and SEO, but it’s easy to overlook. Back in the day, SEOs treated it as another place to stuff keywords, but that’s not what we’re doing here. Proper alt text should be simple, accurate, and describe exactly what’s in the image. Because it follows a clear formula, AI is especially good at helping you generate it at scale.
Here’s how I use AI to write alt text more efficiently:
Gather image file URLs using a crawler like Screaming Frog.
Prompt AI to write concise, descriptive alt text for each image. Batch prompts work well for larger libraries.
Review for clarity, tone, and accuracy before publishing. I typically use GPT for Sheets, but you could just as easily do this in a direct ChatGPT conversation.
Upload the alt text to your CMS or add it manually, whichever fits your workflow and technical capabilities.
Done right, AI-generated alt text improves accessibility and makes your content more understandable to both users and search engines.
Pro tip: You can use AI to generate alt text for individual images, too! Tools like “She Knows Alt Text” can generate alt text for individual images; just upload the file and ask for a few variations to choose from.
Meta Titles and Descriptions
Writing metadata is one of those tasks that gets a little boring, but it’s a foundational part of on-page SEO. Meta titles and descriptions can directly impact click-through rates, and in some cases, even rankings. AI can help take the manual effort out of metadata creation.
While tools like GPT for Sheets can handle metadata in bulk, I find the results more tailored and effective when I prompt AI on a page-by-page basis, especially for pages meant to serve people searching for specific information or services. The importance of the page should determine the level of effort you put into generating the meta data, generally speaking.
Here’s how I do it with AI:
Set the rules: Tell ChatGPT your metadata best practices (e.g., character limits, tone, brand name usage).
Paste the page text into the chat to give it context.
Ask for multiple options for meta titles and descriptions.
Refine as needed by giving feedback and prompting revisions. Once you get a result you like, start pasting other pages into the chat. (It moves faster once it knows what you want.)
For direct, concise meta descriptions, ask AI to summarize the page within a specific character limit (usually under 155 characters).
Metadata might be small, but it can be a high-impact win. Whether you’re generating it at scale or fine-tuning individual pages, AI makes the process faster without sacrificing quality.
Auditing and Generating Schema Markup
If you’re using a plugin to generate structured data, schema markup isn’t all that time-consuming. The problem is, most plugins don’t nest schema properly and provide generic, surface-level information to search engines. With the right context, AI can help you create far more tailored markup.
Here’s how I use AI to improve schema implementation:
Do your homework: Find a trusted source on structured data best practices (something you’d consider your schema source of best practices).
Share that source with the AI to establish your standards and objective.
Ask AI to audit your current schema against those best practices.
Have AI generate new JSON-LD markup, specifying the schema types you want, using the best practices from your source.
QA thoroughly using Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool or Rich Results Test before deploying.
When schema is done right, it can enhance your visibility in search through rich results and SERP features. When it’s done poorly (or skipped entirely) you miss out on those opportunities. With a bit of upfront guidance, AI can generate clean, nested schema that fits your strategy better than most plugins, and with far less manual effort creating it yourself.
How to Integrate AI into Your Workflow Today
AI is most useful when it becomes part of your everyday workflow. For me, the real value comes when it helps speed up the tasks that usually slow me down, without sacrificing quality.
Here’s how to find the best ways to integrate AI into your day-to-day now:
Identify repetitive or time-consuming tasks.
Save your best-performing prompts and built mini workflows around them (and custom GPTs.)
Create a few go-to templates (especially for things like metadata and content outlines).
Encourage your team to experiment and share what’s working. Sharing is caring!
Always review AI output with a critical eye. It's an assistant, not a replacement.
Whether you’re mapping redirects or generating schema, AI can help you move faster and think more strategically. Start small, iterate, and keep building. You’ll be surprised how much time you can save and fun you can have hacking your own workday.
Article by
Emily Brady
Emily Brady is the Director of SEO at Omnizant, where she helps law firms grow their visibility through smart, ethical SEO strategies. With over a decade of experience, she specializes in legal SEO, local search, and content that meets Google’s E-E-A-T standards. Emily stays ahead of trends through active industry involvement and believes in a balanced approach to AI and human input. Her leadership empowers clients to achieve lasting, measurable growth online.
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