Has anyone actually seen consistent gains from AI-assisted internal linking, or is it mostly cleanup work?

[mercer]

I’ve been testing AI-assisted internal linking on a few niche sites over the last couple of months, and I’m starting to think the results are a bit more modest than some people make them sound.

A few observations from my side:

1. **It’s good for scale, not magic**
On sites with 200+ articles, AI can surface decent linking opportunities faster than manual review. That part is real. But in my experience, most of the “best” links it suggests are just obvious contextual matches you’d probably find with a decent crawl and a spreadsheet anyway.

2. **Anchor text quality still needs human review**
The tools I tried were okay at finding related pages, but they often pushed anchors that were too repetitive or slightly awkward. If you let it run fully automated, you can easily end up with over-optimized patterns. I’m not convinced that’s a net positive long term.

3. **The biggest gains seem to come from fixing site architecture**
On one affiliate site, the real improvement came after I cleaned up category structure, added a few hub pages, and made sure important pages were within a reasonable click depth. Internal linking helped after that, but I wouldn’t credit the AI layer for the main lift.

4. **It works better on informational sites than thin affiliate sites**
When there’s a strong topical cluster, AI can do a decent job identifying supporting links. On smaller affiliate sites with limited content, the recommendations felt forced and sometimes irrelevant.

5. **I’d trust AI for suggestions, not execution**
My current workflow is basically:
– crawl the site
– let the tool suggest linking opportunities
– manually approve the important links
– batch-add the safer ones
– ignore anything that looks like it was generated just to increase link count

So my question is: **has anyone here actually seen measurable ranking or traffic improvements specifically from AI-driven internal linking, beyond just making the site cleaner and easier to manage?**

I’m not saying it doesn’t help. I just think a lot of the benefit may come from the underlying SEO cleanup rather than the AI itself.

Would be interested to hear:
– what tools you’re using
– whether you automate anchor insertion or keep it manual
– if you’ve seen gains on affiliate sites specifically
– whether you think this is more

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