Anyone else seeing AI content still rank fine if the intent is tight?

[mike_donovan]

Been testing this on a couple of smaller affiliate sites over the last few months, and honestly the results are a lot less dramatic than people make it sound.

I’ve got one site in the home niche where I used AI to draft maybe 70% of the content, then I cleaned it up manually, added real comparisons, and tightened the intent around buyer questions. Nothing fancy. No big brand signals. Just decent internal linking, solid titles, and pages that actually answer the query.

A few observations:

– Informational posts are still bringing in traffic if they’re specific enough
– “Best X for Y” pages seem to convert better than generic review posts
– CTR improved after I rewrote titles to sound less SEO-ish
– Thin AI content gets crushed pretty fast, no surprise there
– Google seems more forgiving when the page clearly solves one exact problem

I’m not saying AI content is some magic shortcut. It’s not. But I also don’t buy the whole “AI content is dead” thing either. Feels more like the bar is just higher now.

What I’m seeing is that the sites getting hit are usually the ones pumping out broad, samey articles with no real angle. The ones doing okay are the ones where the content is edited like a real site owner actually cares about conversion.

Curious what everyone else is seeing lately.

Are you still using AI for first drafts, or are you backing off and going more manual after the last updates?

[Author]

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