I’ve been testing a few AI-assisted workflows for internal linking across a couple of niche sites, and I’m curious where everyone else is landing on this.

My setup is pretty straightforward:

– WordPress sites in the 50–300 post range
– Mostly informational content with a few affiliate pages
– A mix of old articles that haven’t been updated in a while
– Manual internal linking before this was pretty inconsistent, honestly

What I’ve been trying is using AI to identify semantically relevant anchors and then batching link suggestions through a spreadsheet before applying them in WordPress. The idea was to make linking more systematic without turning it into a fully automated mess.

A few things I’ve noticed so far:

1. **It helps with coverage, but not always quality**
AI is decent at finding related pages, especially for broader topical clusters. But it still tends to suggest links that are technically relevant but not always useful from a user perspective. Sometimes it over-links to weaker pages just because the terms match.

2. **Anchor variety matters more than I expected**
If you let the system run too loose, you end up with repetitive anchors that feel unnatural. I’ve had better results by limiting exact-match anchors and forcing more contextual phrasing.

3. **It seems to help crawl paths more than rankings directly**
I’m not seeing dramatic ranking jumps just from adding links. What I am seeing is better indexation on deeper pages and faster movement for pages that were previously isolated. That feels more realistic to me than expecting some magic boost.

4. **Automation still needs human review**
I don’t trust fully automated internal linking unless the site is very tightly controlled. On smaller affiliate sites, one bad link can send relevance signals in the wrong direction. I’d rather keep the workflow semi-automated and review the suggested placements.

I’m also testing this on a couple of GEO-style content clusters where the topical relationships are a bit broader, and the results are mixed. In some cases the AI does a good job mapping entity relationships. In others it gets too abstract and starts recommending links that look smart on paper but don’t improve the page structure much.

Curious what others are seeing:

– Are you using AI for internal linking, or still doing it manually?
– Have you seen any ranking or crawl improvements from it?
– Are you linking from new content only, or