I’ve been rebuilding a few smaller niche sites over the last couple of months, and I wanted to share what’s been working vs. what’s mostly noise.

A lot of the discussion around AI content still feels a bit too binary: either “AI is dead” or “just publish 500 articles and profit.” In practice, the results I’m seeing are much more dependent on workflow than on the tool itself.

Here’s the current setup I’m testing:

1. **Keyword research first, AI second**
I’m still starting with intent-based keyword clustering, not prompts. If the search intent is weak or the SERP is dominated by forums/brands, I usually skip it. AI doesn’t fix bad keyword selection.

2. **AI for drafting, not final publishing**
I use AI to build first drafts, outlines, comparisons, and FAQ sections. But I still manually tighten the intro, add real examples, and make sure the article actually answers the query. On some articles, especially affiliate ones, that extra editing seems to matter more than people expect.

3. **Internal linking is doing more than I thought**
I’ve been using a fairly strict topical hub structure on WordPress, and the pages with better internal link flow tend to index faster and hold rankings more consistently. I’m starting to think many “content quality” issues are really architecture issues.

4. **Automation is useful, but only in narrow places**
I’ve had decent results automating things like:
– content briefs
– schema generation
– internal link suggestions
– image alt text
– content refresh reminders

But I’m still avoiding full auto-publishing. Every time I’ve tried to remove too much human review, the content quality drops in ways that are obvious to users, even if the text looks fine on paper.

5. **Affiliate monetization still depends on page intent**
Informational content can support affiliate pages, but I’m seeing much better conversion when the article is aligned with commercial intent from the start. In other words, “best X for Y” still outperforms generic listicles with affiliate links slapped on later.

What I’m still unsure about:
– whether Google is getting better at detecting templated AI patterns
– how much content refreshes matter compared to new content
–