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 a couple of niche sites, and I’m starting to think the results depend a lot more on site structure than on the tool itself.

On one site with a fairly clean topical map, using an AI process to suggest contextual links between existing posts gave me a noticeable lift in crawl depth and a few long-tail rankings improved within 3–5 weeks. Nothing dramatic, but enough to keep me interested.

On another site with messier categories and overlapping topics, the same approach was much less useful. The AI kept suggesting links that were technically relevant but didn’t really help user flow or topical clustering. In some cases it was just creating more noise.

What I’m seeing so far:
– AI can speed up link discovery quite a bit
– It still needs human review for relevance and anchor choice
– The biggest gains seem to come from fixing the site architecture first
– Internal links to pages already close to ranking tend to move faster than brand-new pages
– Over-automating this can make the site feel bloated

I’m curious how others are handling this in 2025. Are you using AI just for suggestions, or are you letting it insert links automatically? And has anyone measured whether this works better for affiliate sites vs informational sites?

My current view is that AI internal linking is useful, but only if the underlying content map is solid. Otherwise you’re just automating a bad structure.

Would be interested to hear real-world results, especially from people managing larger content libraries.

[Author]

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