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 still not convinced it’s the “easy win” a lot of people make it out to be.

To be clear, I’m not talking about blindly auto-inserting links into every article. I’m talking about using AI to:

– identify semantically relevant pages
– suggest anchor text variations
– find orphaned or underlinked content
– map supporting articles to money pages
– prioritize links based on topical clusters

On paper, this should be a great fit for AI. In practice, I’m seeing mixed results.

What’s working:
– Cleaning up old content with obvious missed links
– Finding related supporting articles faster than manual review
– Improving crawl paths on larger sites with 100+ posts
– Helping surface pages that were buried and barely linked

What’s not working as well:
– AI often suggests links that are “topically related” but not actually useful to the reader
– Anchor text can get repetitive if you don’t heavily edit it
– Some suggestions are too broad, especially on posts with weak topical focus
– It still takes human review if you care about quality and not just volume

I’ve also noticed that the impact seems much stronger on sites with decent topical organization already. If the site architecture is messy, AI linking mostly helps expose the mess rather than fix it.

For context, I’m testing this on a couple of affiliate sites in fairly competitive niches, and the main measurable improvement so far has been better indexing of deeper pages. I haven’t seen anything dramatic in rankings yet, though a few pages did move from page 2 to the lower end of page 1 after internal link updates. Hard to say how much of that was the links versus normal fluctuation.

My current view is that AI internal linking is useful as an efficiency tool, not a magic ranking lever. It saves time, especially on older sites, but the quality still depends on your site structure and how disciplined you are with topic clusters.

Curious how others are handling this:
– Are you using AI to suggest internal links, or fully automating it?
– Have you seen ranking lifts, or mostly just better site cleanup?
– Any tools/workflows that actually produce good suggestions without a ton of manual editing?

I’m open to being

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