Anyone actually seeing consistent wins from AI-assisted internal linking, or is it still mostly manual?

[mercer]

I’ve been testing a few different internal linking workflows across a couple of niche sites over the last few months, and I’m starting to think the “AI will handle internal links at scale” pitch is still a bit optimistic.

What I’ve found so far:

– **Pure AI suggestions** are usually decent for obvious matches, but they miss context a lot.
– **Manual linking** is still better for commercial pages and anything that needs stronger topical control.
– **Hybrid workflows** seem to be the most practical so far: AI suggests candidates, then I approve and adjust anchors manually.

On one site in the home improvement niche, I ran a small test:

– 80 older posts
– 12 new supporting articles added
– AI-generated internal link suggestions inserted into drafts
– manual review before publishing

The result was fine, but not dramatic. A few pages improved in crawl depth and impressions, but I wouldn’t call it a game changer. The biggest issue was that the AI kept recommending links that were technically relevant but not strategically useful. It would link to informational posts when I really wanted to push relevance toward money pages or cluster hubs.

A couple of observations:

1. **Anchor text matters more than people admit.**
AI is often too generic unless you force very specific rules.

2. **Entity matching is helpful, but not enough.**
It can find related pages, but it doesn’t understand site architecture the way a human does.

3. **At scale, the review step becomes the bottleneck.**
If you’re still checking every suggestion manually, the time savings shrink fast.

4. **For older sites, internal linking cleanup may be more valuable than adding new content.**
Especially if you’ve got orphaned pages or weak hub structure.

I’m curious what others are doing here:

– Are you using AI for internal linking in production?
– If yes, are you letting it auto-insert links or only suggest them?
– Have you seen actual ranking gains, or mostly just better crawl paths?
– Any tools/workflows you’d recommend that don’t create a bunch of noisy, low-value links?

I’m open to being wrong on this, but right now my view is that AI is useful for **speeding up internal link discovery**, not for replacing strategy. If you don’t already have a

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