143 webmasters decided to compete to see who will make the best, from the point of view of SEO, website exclusively on generated AI content. After 6 months, the winner will receive $2,500 and the title of the coolest website creation specialist using ChatGPT.
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- Running an AI content marathon
- First results and expert advice
- 30 days of content generation
- 60 days of content generation
- Interim results
- Participant sites
Launching an AI content marathon
The bulk of the latest news from the SEO world is somehow related to large language models. All webmasters are now wondering: will Google rank AI content? And if so, for how long?
Is it possible to create a completely new website and upload a bunch of generated articles to it? Will these articles be included in the search index? Will they get good positions and, as a result, organic traffic?
There are already a lot of strategies on the Internet that promise webmasters mountains of gold and are based on tools such as OpenAI, ChatGPT, Google Bard, Surfer SEO AI, Mid Journey, Claude, etc.
But one person will not be able to test them all. Therefore, a well-known SEO specialist, Spencer Hawes, founder nichepursuits.com I decided to organize a competition between everyone in order to identify the best approach to AI site generation.
Khos turned to his subscribers and offered fairly simple conditions (similar to those that 9SEO announced at the time for its annual marathons):
- You are entering the race with a new website.
- You create articles for him using AI (you can edit them manually).
- Whoever has the most organic traffic from Google in 6 months takes the prize of $2,500.
A week after the announcement, 143 webmasters registered in the marathon. Spencer gathered them in a video meeting and gave answers to the most frequently asked questions:
- link building is allowed;
- the number of pages on the site is unlimited;
- any AI software can be used…
The race has started. Webmasters registered domains, began to design websites and create content, while simultaneously posting small reports on their successes to the community community.nichepursuits.com .
First results and expert advice
In the process, well-known opinion leaders joined the marathon, who shared with the participants various tricks of working with AI content. For example, Dustin Stout (founder magai.co ) said that it is most effective to ask neural networks very specific questions and generate text in small parts.
You create the structure of your future material, with sections and subsections, and then for each of them you ask separate questions and get specific, highly specialized pieces of content …
Two weeks after the start, we summed up the interim results, arranging it all in the form of a table:
- participant’s name;
- number of published articles;
- total traffic volume;
- number of organic sessions;
- total number of clicks from GSC;
- the site address (if the participant agrees to share it).
As always happens in such cases, quite a lot of webmasters did not start publishing articles at all. The maximum they could do was record a motivational start video and register a domain.
About 40 webmasters did not even send interim results, which was one of the mandatory conditions for participation. That is, in fact, two weeks after the start, only 100 out of 143 participants remained in the marathon.
30 days of content generation
A month later, some of the webmasters already had their first impressive results. For example, the leaders have published about 50-100 articles, which have already started to bring them more than 1,000 organic sessions.
Interesting observations from the participants:
- even with the participation of AI, it takes much longer to create articles than expected (sometimes several days per 1 page);
- materials with a volume of about 1,000 words show themselves quite well.
63 people have reached this stage, less than half of the initial list. That is, even if the content is written by a robot for you, and you have real money as motivation, you still need to work pretty hard to achieve at least some goals.
In order to add some motivation to the participants, on the 49th day of the marathon, Khos invited Casey Botticello, a well-known SEO specialist who has been developing his sites on AI content for 11 months, to the community. And one of theseprojects bring in $15,000 per month (in fact, more than $20,000 already).
Casey said that the most important thing in creating websites using AI is a stable system. You have to find the right approach to generating materials and then scale it up.
60 days of content generation
After two months of active work, the monthly top webmasters looked like this (data for 30 days):
- 184 articles– 9,900 sessions (although it is marked in GA4 as “organic”, in fact most of it comes from the site msn.com (referral traffic) – 7,770 sessions; the real organic here was about 2,000 sessions per month)
- 111 articles – 9,345 sessions
- 217 articles– 339 sessions
- 49 articles – 324 sessions
- 25 articles – 225 sessions
Here is a brief extract from the strategy of the real leader of the race (who has already started monetizing his site and earned $3.41):
- manual indexing request for each article;
- 4-5 images for each text;
- mandatory internal linking;
- additional optimization of materials for Pinterest.
Interim results
So, what conclusions can be drawn at this stage?:
- Google ranks AI content.
- Making websites based on AI content is not as easy as it seems.
- Even to create AI sites, motivation is needed (out of 143 participants, two of the six months of the marathon were able to last a little more than 40 people).
Member sites
I think it will be interesting to take a look at the specific websites of marathon runners. Of course, you can log in to the community yourself community.nichepursuits.com and see. But registration is needed there, and in general the process is not very fast, so I will make it easier for you.
Chakraserenity.com (esoteric):
Coffeeroasterfinder.com (search for coffee roasting locations):
Airportfolder.com (Airport Assistant):
Drivenwriter.com (a blog for writers):
Fluffyhighlandcows.com (website about cows):
I tried to select the most diverse representatives of the race. There is also one of the leaders (at the moment), by the way.
Nobody is doing much work on building backlinks yet. Or maybe he is, but there is not enough information from the same Semrush, through which he pulled out these graphs.
This is how the link profile of almost all participating sites looks like:
I will note a common feature of most sites based on AI content: you start publishing content, Google starts ranking it, and then there is a drawdown (both in visibility and in traffic). I observe a similar situation on a large number of sites, including those not related to this marathon.
That’s all for now. I will try to publish a post about my own experiment with AI content within a few months. However, I’m working with an old site. But judging by the Telegram, many people are interested.
And yes, if I don’t forget, I will publish the results of this marathon in 4 months.
What do you think about AI content? Does it make sense to work with him in the long run? Maybe you are already actively using some of the copywriting automation tools yourself? Share it in the comments!