[Journey] Building AI content sites for SEO ($1600 MRR) — A Software Engineer's perspective

sqldumper said:

I had a site similar to this. Different niche that earns me over $3000 worth of stuff just from a single site. But I have forgotten since it's all were managed and automated with OpenRouter models. It was a one specific niche and product. But a few days ago my hosting company (it was a cheap hosting company as that was one of my testing projects) and the site went down and is gone. I still own the domain but all the content is gone. I am building it back for a better hosting company. I contacted Bluehost and no reply. Sucks! As I spent some decent credit on Claude models at OpenRouter for content.

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norsutom said:

Congrats! Would love to hear some more about the GSC automation you have - is it giving you a daily/weekly list of keywords to target, or pages to update/topics to write etc?

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kingkhavn said:

It's a closed-loop system. GSC data flows in daily → a scoring engine evaluates every past change (did it help or hurt?) → those learnings feed back into what gets optimized next. The key insight from 575 experiments: most SEO "improvements" actually hurt rankings. So the system learned which changes work at which positions, and only executes the high-win-rate moves. The AI agents do the content work overnight in parallel. I just check the dashboard in the morning.

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norsutom said:

Thanks, that's great! So I guess you/ai agent then log whatever changes have been made in a database?

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vijaybhaskar184 said:

Do you edit the AI generated content manually before posting? And also do you generate images?

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kingkhavn said:

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Update on site3: survived last few Google core update

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1. impressive. do you build links at all?
2. howmany pages do your websites have?

bottingisfine said:

1. impressive. do you build links at all?
2. howmany pages do your websites have?

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kingkhavn said:

1. No, not link building at all, and i actually do not know how to do it
2. More than 1k pages

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bottingisfine said:

do you

do you publish all pages at once or dripfeed ? fresh domain?

thank you

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Comrade Luigi said:

ok nvm that was a dumb question as i read thru the thread yes it is programmatic pages. haha. but i am very curious to hear about your keyword research process

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kingkhavn said:

My journey building AI content sites for SEO — a software engineer's perspective​

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Background: I'm a software engineer. CS degree, been working in AI/ML for a while. A few years ago I got into SEO almost by accident — started applying the same engineering mindset to content. Build, measure, iterate.

That led to building a lot of travel sites. Over 100 at this point.

Most are dead. One works really well — peaked over 1k clicks/day recently. A few are somewhere in the middle. Revenue is around 1600$ per month

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I'll share GSC screenshots as this thread goes on.

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Why travel

Honestly, it was a good fit for what I was trying to do technically. Travel content is highly structured — attractions, prices, opening hours, itineraries. Easy to model, easy to generate at scale, easy to validate.

It's also brutally competitive. Which made it a good stress test.

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What I actually built

I didn't just publish AI articles and wait. That part I figured out pretty early doesn't scale the way people think it does.

What I ended up building is closer to a content ops system:

— daily GSC monitoring per page, automated
— a scoring function that decides which pages to touch and how
— an autopilot that commits changes (content refresh, meta rewrite, internal links) based on that score
— a recheck loop at 5–7 days to confirm or revert

The content is AI. But the decision layer on top of it is engineered, not vibes-based.

That distinction matters a lot. I'll get into the specifics as the thread goes on.

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What this thread is

Just a log. I'll post what I'm testing, what the numbers say, what broke, what worked.

No course. No upsell. I just think this space moves fast enough that it's worth documenting in public.

If you're running AI content sites and thinking about how to systematize it — follow along. And if you're already doing something similar, I'd genuinely like to compare notes.

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More coming soon — starting with the GSC data.

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