Has anyone actually seen consistent gains from AI-assisted internal linking at scale?

[mercer]

I’ve been testing a few AI-assisted internal linking workflows across some smaller niche sites over the last couple of months, and I’m still not fully convinced the results justify the hype.

To be clear, I’m not talking about basic “suggest related posts” widgets. I mean a more structured process where AI is used to:

– identify topical clusters
– find orphaned or weakly linked pages
– suggest contextual anchors
– prioritize links based on estimated page value
– update older content in batches

In theory, this should be a pretty clean win. Better crawl paths, stronger topical relevance, better distribution of link equity, and less manual work. But in practice, I’m seeing mixed results.

What I’ve noticed so far:
1. On sites with already decent content architecture, the gains are modest at best.
2. On messier sites, AI can create some useful link opportunities, but it also tends to overlink or suggest anchors that feel unnatural.
3. The biggest improvement seems to come not from “more links,” but from fixing obvious structural gaps and making sure the top pages actually support the deeper ones.

One thing I’m skeptical about is the idea that AI can reliably choose the “best” internal link placements without human review. It can usually find semantically related pages, but that doesn’t always mean the link belongs there from a UX or conversion standpoint. I’ve seen it recommend links in spots where I probably would never place them manually.

My current setup is pretty simple:
– crawl the site
– map pages by topic
– flag pages with low internal link counts
– use AI to suggest 3–5 contextual links per page
– manually approve anything going into money pages or high-traffic pages

This is still faster than doing everything by hand, but I’m not sure it’s the kind of breakthrough some people make it out to be.

Curious if anyone here has tested this at meaningful scale and seen real ranking movement, not just better crawl stats or prettier site architecture.

A few questions I’d like to hear opinions on:
– Are you using AI for internal linking, or still doing it manually?
– Have you seen measurable ranking improvements after large-scale internal link updates?
– Do you trust AI to choose anchor text, or do you override it?
– Has anyone tied this into a proper content optimization workflow in WordPress or another CMS?

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