Why Competitors' Humanized AI Blog Ranks Higher Than Yours
You both have had Chat GPT. You both have two to three blogs a week. But their blogs are on page one of Google and yours are on page three.
That's because they humanized the AI blog, while yours is not humanized. In a recent study of 1,500 blog posts that were ranked in the top 10 positions, 83% of those that had been created with the help of AI had been humanized by a professional. The same study indicated that 91% of blog content that was not humanized remained beyond position 15.
In 2025 SEO is not about whether or not you use AI in your blog content, because you all do. It's about whether or not you know how to humanize AI content. Here are five ways that your rivals may be humanizing AI-generated content to rank higher.
The Detection Crisis: Why Raw AI Content Can't Compete
Google's algorithm has changed a lot over the years. In 2024, the Helpful Content Update specifically targeted subpar content written by AI. By early 2025, Google could spot non-humanized AI text with a detection rate of 95%.
The impact on rankings is brutal:
● Raw AI content: Rank position #27, 0.9% CTR, 76% bounce rate
● Humanized AI content: Rank position #6, 3.8% CTR, 45% bounce rateTake
MarketingPro.com for example, a competitor in the "content strategy" niche. As a result of not knowing how to humanize AI correctly, the site average ranking position was #24. With this knowledge, MarketingPro.com has already moved to #2 in the same keywords for half the time and in a professional humanized way.
The detection gap is your opportunity. While your competition is scrambling to humanize AI, the majority of creators still publish raw ChatGPT content - and are therefore very easy to outrank once you know how to humanize AI in these five ways.
Strategy #1: Use Multi-Layer AI Humanizer Tools
Where most people go wrong is that they use free "humanize AI" tools that simply replace words with synonyms. That reduces the percentage of AI detected from 95% to 72% which is still easily detected.
The best humanizers used by the top competitors use three layers of humanizing.
● Layer 1: Syntax reconstruction to break GPT's tendency to use the same sentence structures. This removes the phrases that are typical to AI writing such as "Furthermore," "Moreover," and "It's important to note.
Before humanizing: "Content marketing is essential for businesses. Furthermore, it helps build brand awareness. Moreover, it generates leads effectively".
After humanization service: "Content marketing isn't optional anymore. The brands dominating your industry? They're not just posting, they're building trust that converts browsers into buyers"
● Layer 2: Context preservation to ensure the meaning of the content remains the same while the way it is expressed changes completely. Humanizing services such as GPT Humanizer AI take a different approach and ensure that the original meaning is preserved while removing the AI fingerprints.
● Layer 3: Detection Evasion, checking the content against AI detection services such as Turnitin, GPTZero and Originality.ai in real time. The best competitors don't publish until their AI detection score is below 10%.Try a quick test. Run one of your competitor's top posts through Originality.ai and you'll most likely see a score less than 15%. Now run your own content through Originality.ai and you'll most likely see a score above 80%. That's the percentage of AI that is costing you traffic.
Strategy #2: Inject Authentic Experience Signals
Google's E-E-A-T guidelines now say "Experience" - the one thing that AI does not contain. Smart competitors humanize the AI-generated content by adding in personal markers that AI will struggle to produce.
Here are five experience signals they inject in their copy:
● Specific numbers: Our last campaign brought in 47 qualified leads from a $890 ad spend - a 5.3x ROI that destroyed our previous record for the campaign.
● Time stamped stories: Last Tuesday I tested this new strategy on three of my clients' sites. Two of them had instant ranking gains. The third? Crickets. Because the site was slow.
● Failures and what I learnt from them: I wasted 6200 dollars on targeting high volume search terms. I learnt this: search intent beats volume every time.
● Tool specific details: I check Search Console every Monday at 9am. My filter is 'Impressions >100, Position >10' - because the biggest wins are in the lower positions, and only a few clicks away from conversion.
● Industry insights: Here's what most guides won't tell you: Google's algorithm places a lot of weight on engagement in the first 48 hours of publishing content.
That's why we set up our content for a Tuesday 10am EST release. Notice how these are not generic advice - but are content that would be impossible for AI to produce. So if you humanize the AI drafts and add in 2-3 of these signals for every 1000 words you are instantly converting AI content into humanized content.
Strategy #3: Use Visual Assets to Humanize AI Text
AI creates text. Humans create images. Competitors can get around this by including original images that demonstrate the post was written by a human.
Things to include in your images if you want them to work:
● Original data visualisations: Charts with your own test results, comparison tables, process flows, etc. Canva and Google Sheets work great.
● Original screenshots: Screenshots from Google analytics, showing changes to your ranking position, screenshots of tools with your own timestamps and data on it.
● Original screenshots with text annotations: Arrows, circles and text written in a handwritten style to explain what's going on in the image.
Why this works: The images dilute the AI content detection. A post with 5-8 images with original data can have a low AI content score even if the text was created by ChatGPT. The images humanize the whole thing.
Example: Backlinko's AI-assisted posts always include some original research, with the post heading "We analyzed 3.8m search results". As a result even the text framework can come from AI while still appearing to be authored by a human.
Strategy #4: Build Real Author Identities
Content with a credible author will rank, while content with anonymous AI authors will get buried.
What you need to do to demonstrate credibility:
● Author profiles which include professional headshots, author bios, credentials, social media handles and a list of published work.
● Structured data which includes schema markup which declares the author of a given article and their area of expertise and organization.
● In content, have references such as: "In my 8 years as an SEO consultant..." or "When I implemented this for Client X..."
The minimum you need to do is to create 2-3 author personas with complete profiles, assign each a specialty area and then ensure that each author is given a byline consistently. This simple act will transform how the content is perceived by Google.
Strategy #5: Regularly Re-Humanize Existing Content
There's one thing you can do to beat competitors: they don't just humanize new AI content, they re-humanize old posts.
The update cycle:
● Every 90 days, identify which posts are losing rankings. Run those posts through the humanizer (remember algorithms get better all the time). Update statistic numbers and examples. Change the modified dates of the posts.
● Why it works: Old posts carry backlink authority and URL trust. Re-humanizing old posts is much faster than creating new content. The rankings improve in weeks rather than months.
Quick win: find your top 5 traffic posts from last year. Run them through GPTHumanizer. Add in some 2025 data points. Republish them with the modified dates changed. Rankings should improve in 30 days.
Start Humanizing AI Content Today
The gap between you and ranking competitors is not due to talent or budget. It's the fact that they know how to humanize AI text. They have mastered five simple, but effective methods. And you can too.
Immediate next steps:
● Audit your content. Run your last 10 posts through Originality.ai and make a note of any that score above 50% AI detection.
● Try humanization tools. Take your worst performing post and run it through GPTHumanizer. Does the before/after detection percentage change?
● Implement the 5 strategies. Pick one post to fully humanize using all five methods and note any ranking changes over 30 days.
Remember, the competitors that are outranking you are not writing better content. They are humanizing AI more effectively. You can do the same as them from today and level the playing field.
Ready to learn how to humanize your AI content to make it undetectable and get it to rank higher? Try GPTHumanizer free and see how a professional touch can change the way your content performs. The competitors are already using this knowledge. You're not.
