Generative AI Content vs. Human Copywriters: Cost, Time & Quality Benchmarks for SMEs

The rise of artificial intelligence in the arena of marketing dates back to the 1950s and 1960s. The preliminary use of AI back in the time revolved around analysing data and dividing customers into segments, helping companies make informed decisions and reach their target audiences more efficiently. However, despite consistent innovations in this arena, AI did not see much progress in its movement in the pre-COVID era. It was only in 2022-2023 that it saw a significant rise in popularity. During this period, AI-generated art became widely recognised, with AI-created portraits and other works making their way into museums across the globe.

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) content generation tools has thrown a new contender into the ring, leaving many SME owners and marketing managers torn: should they embrace the speed and potential cost savings of AI or stick with the proven nuance and strategic depth of human copywriters? Or perhaps, is there a smarter, hybrid approach?

This article aims to provide a clear, numbers-first benchmark across three critical factors – cost, time-to-publish, and quality & ranking velocity – to help you make an informed decision for your business. After all, with approximately 68% of marketers already utilising AI in their daily tasks, it’s clear AI isn’t a fleeting trend but a fundamental shift.

Benchmark Framework: Quantifying Your Content Strategy

To truly compare AI content with human-generated content, we need to look beyond anecdotal evidence and establish clear benchmarks. We’ll examine:

1. Cost: The direct and hidden financial outlay for each content creation method.
2. Time-to-Publish: How quickly can you get content from concept to live publication?
3. Quality & Ranking Velocity: The effectiveness of the content in achieving your marketing goals, particularly in terms of SEO performance and audience engagement.

Cost Breakdown: Where Does Your Money Go?

Typically, to make your content work well and hit the target, you have three ways: using a marketing agency, hiring an apprentice, or hiring an experienced digital marketer or using AI altogether. Understanding the financial implications is crucial for budget-conscious SMEs. Here’s a breakdown of typical costs:

Generative AI Tool

Subscription: AI writing tools typically operate on a monthly subscription model. You can expect to pay anywhere from £20 per month for basic tools like ChatGPT (plus a higher tier for more advanced features) to more significant investments for enterprise-level platforms offering extensive features and usage limits.

Hidden Costs:

• Prompt Engineering: Crafting effective prompts to get the desired output from AI requires skill and time. Poor prompts lead to irrelevant or low-quality content, necessitating more iterations and editing.
• Editing & Fact-Checking: Raw AI output rarely, if ever, goes live without significant human review. This involves correcting factual errors, refining the tone, improving readability, and ensuring brand consistency.
• Briefing & Oversight: Even with AI, clear content briefs are essential. You still need to define the topic, target audience, keywords, and desired outcomes.
• SME Review: Internal review by subject matter experts is crucial, especially for technical or sensitive topics, adding another layer of time and cost.

Freelance/In-house Human Copywriter

• Freelance Rates: According to the ProCopywriters 2024 survey, the average day rate for a freelance copywriter in the UK is £440. Project-based rates vary widely, but for a typical blog post, you might pay anywhere from £150 to £500+, depending on the length, complexity, and the copywriter’s experience. Junior copywriters might start around £250 per day, while senior copywriters can command £800 – £2000+ per day.
• In-house Salary: The cost of an in-house marketer or copywriter includes salary, benefits, training, and overheads. This can be a significant fixed cost, but it offers dedicated expertise and deep brand understanding.

Hidden Costs:

• Briefing & Revisions: While often more efficient than with AI, clarifying briefs and managing revisions still consumes time.
• Research Time: Human copywriters spend time researching topics thoroughly, especially for complex subjects.
• Training & Development: Investing in a human team means ongoing training to keep skills sharp and up-to-date with evolving SEO and content trends.

Agency (Loop Digital’s Internal Benchmark + Market Comps)

• Bundle Price/Retainer: A full-service agency typically offers content creation as part of a broader marketing retainer. For SMEs spending £1k–£20k/month on marketing, this could mean content services are included within a retainer ranging from £700 to £2,500+ per month for content marketing alone, often incorporating strategy, SEO, and distribution.

Hidden Costs:

• Onboarding & Communication: Initial setup and ongoing communication with the agency are necessary.
• Strategic Alignment: Ensuring the agency’s content strategy aligns perfectly with your business goals requires active collaboration.

In summary of cost: While AI tools boast low subscription fees, the hidden costs of human oversight, editing, and strategic input quickly add up. For quality, nuanced content, especially for crucial topics, a purely AI-driven approach often proves to be a false economy.

Time-to-Publish: Speed vs. Precision

Speed is often cited as a key advantage of AI, but the full publishing workflow tells a different story.

• AI Draft: A raw AI draft can be generated in minutes.
• Freelance Copywriter: A well-briefed freelance copywriter can typically deliver a first draft of a standard blog post in 2-5 business days. This includes research, writing, and initial self-editing.
• Agency: With an established process, an agency can often deliver content within 5-10 business days from briefing to final draft, including internal quality checks and initial SEO optimisation.

However, the “time-to-publish” metric needs to encompass the entire workflow:

• AI: Rapid draft generation, but often followed by extensive human editing, fact-checking, and refinement. This can easily extend the overall time to several hours, if not a full day, per piece for a truly publishable asset.
• Human: The initial draft takes longer, but the revision cycles are typically fewer, and the content is generally closer to publishable quality from the outset.
• Agency: Leverages a streamlined workflow with dedicated project managers and specialists (writers, editors, SEOs), often leading to a predictable and efficient publishing cadence.

Quality & Ranking Velocity: The True Measure of Success

This is where the rubber meets the road. Content isn’t just about production; it’s about impact.

Google’s Helpful Content System and E-E-A-T

Google’s core focus is on delivering helpful, reliable, and people-first content. This applies equally to human- and AI-generated content. The E-E-A-T framework (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) is paramount, especially for YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) topics.

• Experience: Does the content demonstrate first-hand experience with the topic?
• Expertise: Is the author a true expert in the field?
• Authoritativeness: Is the website or author a recognised authority on the subject?
• Trustworthiness: Is the information accurate, transparent, and reliable?

AI’s limitations in E-E-A-T: AI models, by their nature, lack genuine experience or lived expertise. They can synthesise information, but they cannot be an expert. This becomes particularly problematic for:

• YMYL Content: Topics like health, finance, and legal advice fall under YMYL. Google applies stricter E-E-A-T standards here because inaccurate information can have severe real-world consequences. AI, while capable of pulling data, struggles to understand the sensitivities, ethical considerations, and real-life nuances required for such content. For example, a personal account of ‘What to do if I face loss in the stock market’, offering genuine empathy and actionable advice, simply cannot be replicated by AI. Furthermore, AI-generated content on sensitive topics such as healthcare, lifestyle and law is often not well received by the audience, as it sounds too robotic and lacks the touch of human understanding. 

• Brand Voice & Nuance: AI often struggles to capture a unique brand voice, leading to generic or bland content. Human copywriters are crucial for crafting compelling narratives that resonate emotionally with an audience, building brand loyalty and differentiation.

• Factual Risk: While AI can access vast datasets, it can also “hallucinate” or confidently present incorrect information. Human fact-checking remains indispensable to maintain credibility.

The Emory/Goizueta Study

A study by Professor Rajiv Garg at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School, while focused on educational content, provides interesting insights into AI’s limitations in conveying complex information and fostering engagement. The study found that student performance was highest when content was human-generated and delivered by an AI voice/avatar and second best for purely human-generated and -delivered content. Critically, purely AI-generated content (even with human delivery) performed worse than human-generated content. This suggests that while AI can assist in delivery, the creation of truly effective and impactful content still benefits significantly from human intellect and understanding.

SERP Ranking Factors & Optimisation

AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation)

Optimising for “People Also Ask” sections, featured snippets, and direct answers in search is crucial. This often requires concise, structured answers to common questions. For example, if we take our primary question as a case study, ‘What to do if I face a loss in the stock market?’, AEO questions surrounding it, such as ‘What is the 7% rule in stocks?’, also come along. While AI can draft these, a human must ensure they are truly accurate, comprehensive, and fully address user intent, drawing from diverse, authoritative sources like Reddit or Quora for real-world user questions and nuanced answers.

Google SERP showing the ‘people also ask’ questions along with the main search result.

GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) & SGE (Search Generative Experience)

With the advent of Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE), content is increasingly being summarised and synthesised by AI directly in search results. Optimising for GEO means creating content that is easily digestible and authoritative, so AI models recognise and cite your brand as a trusted source. This necessitates strong E-E-A-T signals and highly structured, clear information, which a human eye can ensure.

Side-by-Side Table: AI vs. Human Content Scorecard

Issues with AI-Generated Content

While AI offers undeniable efficiencies, several critical issues persist:

• Lack of Genuine Understanding: AI doesn’t understand concepts; it predicts the next most probable word based on patterns. This leads to content that can sound technically correct but lacks insight, empathy, or genuine originality.
• Sensitivity Gaps: As highlighted for YMYL topics, AI struggles with the nuances and sensitivities of human experience. Content on mental health, personal finance, or lifestyle often requires a deep understanding of human psychology and individual circumstances that AI cannot replicate.
• Generic & Repetitive Output: Without careful prompting and significant human editing, AI often produces generic, uninspired content that sounds similar to other AI-generated pieces. This fails to differentiate your brand.
• Google’s Stance on AI Content: Google doesn’t penalise AI content simply for being AI-generated. However, it does penalise unhelpful, unoriginal, low-quality, or spammy content, regardless of how it’s created. If AI is used to mass-produce shallow content, it will likely suffer in rankings. The emphasis is firmly on helpfulness and originality.
• Maintaining Tone Consistency: While AI can be trained on a brand’s tone, ensuring consistency across diverse content forms and evolving brand messaging still requires human oversight. AI tools can help, but the final arbiter of brand voice must be human.

Which Route Fits Your Situation? A Decision Tree for SMEs

The optimal choice depends on your specific needs and resources:

• Budget-Constrained & High-Volume, Low-Sensitivity Content → AI + Editor: If you need a large volume of straightforward, informational content (e.g., general definitions like “What is SEO?” or “What is digital marketing?”) and if you have an in-house team capable of rigorous editing, fact-checking, and human optimisation, then an AI tool, combined with substantial human input, can be a cost-effective solution.
• Niche, Regulated, or Brand-Critical Content → Senior Human Copywriter: For content that demands deep expertise, addresses sensitive topics (like health or finance), or is crucial for establishing a unique brand voice and thought leadership, investing in a senior freelance copywriter or a dedicated in-house expert is paramount. The nuances, accuracy, and empathetic tone required simply aren’t within current AI capabilities.
• Scale, Strategy, & ROI Focus → Agency or Hybrid Model: If your SME is in growth mode, spending £1k–£20k / month on marketing, and needs a strategic, scalable content operation with proven ROI, then a full-service agency like Loop Digital, or a sophisticated AI-human hybrid model, is often the smartest investment. An agency can leverage AI for efficiency (e.g., initial drafts, keyword research) while providing the critical human layer for strategy, quality control, E-E-A-T, and brand consistency.

AI is a powerful tool, capable of significantly impacting content production. However, it is not a magic bullet. For SMEs seeking genuine ROI from their content marketing, the answer isn’t a simple “AI vs. human”. Instead, it’s about understanding the strengths and weaknesses of each and choosing the right blend. While AI can certainly slash production time and budget for certain tasks, a human eye remains absolutely essential for strategy, compliance, brand tone, and most importantly, for creating content that genuinely connects with your audience, builds trust, and ultimately drives business growth. The smartest option, particularly for discerning SMEs, is often an AI-human hybrid, strategically implemented to maximise both efficiency and impact – a solution that Loop Digital is expertly positioned to deliver.

Ready to Optimise Your Content Strategy?

Unsure how to strike the right balance for your SME? At Loop Digital, we specialise in crafting ROI-driven content strategies that leverage the best of both human expertise and AI efficiency.

• Book a Free Content Audit: Let us assess your current content strategy and identify growth opportunities. 

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FAQ

1. Will AI copy be penalised by Google?

No, Google does not penalise content simply because it was generated by AI. However, Google does penalise low-quality, unhelpful, unoriginal, or spammy content, regardless of its origin. The focus is on the content’s value to the user and its adherence to E-E-A-T principles.

2. How to keep the tone consistent?

While AI tools can be trained on a brand’s existing content to learn its tone, maintaining true and evolving tone consistency requires human oversight. A style guide, clear brand guidelines, and regular human review of AI-generated content are essential.

3. Can I mix AI and human copywriters?

Absolutely! This is often the most effective approach. AI can handle initial research, content outlines, and first drafts for certain topics, freeing up human copywriters to focus on strategic ideation, refining tone, adding unique insights, conducting in-depth research, and ensuring compliance for sensitive topics. This hybrid model offers the best of both worlds: AI speed with human quality and nuance.