I’m thrilled to sit down with Milena Traikovich, a renowned Demand Gen expert who has dedicated her career to helping businesses craft powerful campaigns for nurturing high-quality leads. With her deep expertise in analytics, performance optimization, and lead generation, Milena offers invaluable insights into the ever-evolving world of digital content. Today, we’re diving into the fascinating results of a recent study on AI-generated content and its performance in search engine rankings, exploring what this means for SEO strategies and the future of content creation.
Can you walk us through the main purpose behind experimenting with AI-generated content in search rankings?
Absolutely, Sophia. The core idea was to test whether AI-generated content could hold its own in search engine results without much human intervention. We wanted to see if it could achieve sustainable visibility on new domains with zero prior authority. It’s a pressing question for many businesses looking to scale content production quickly, and our experiment aimed to provide real data on whether this approach could work long-term or if it’s just a short-term gimmick.
How did you go about selecting the niches for the 20 new websites in your study?
We chose 20 diverse niches like Arts & Entertainment, Health & Medicine, and Technology to get a broad sense of how AI content performs across different audience interests and search behaviors. The selection was strategic—we picked popular categories with varying levels of competition and search volume to reflect real-world scenarios. This helped us understand if certain topics might naturally lend themselves better to AI content or if there were universal challenges regardless of the subject matter.
What was your process for creating the 2,000 articles using AI, and why did you limit human input?
We used an AI Writer tool to generate all 2,000 articles with a one-click approach, keeping human editing or additional prompts to an absolute minimum. The goal was to isolate the performance of raw AI output and see how it fares without the polish of human oversight. This mirrored a scenario where businesses might rely heavily on automation for speed and scale, and we wanted to test if that raw content could still resonate with search engines and users based purely on its algorithmic creation.
The early results looked quite promising with a high indexation rate. What did that initial success tell you?
In the first 36 days, seeing over 70% of the pages indexed by Google was a strong signal that search engines are open to crawling and including AI-generated content initially. It suggested that the barrier to entry isn’t the creation method itself but perhaps what comes after. That early traction, with eight sites ranking for over 1,000 keywords each, gave us a glimpse of potential—showing that AI content can gain visibility fast if the setup is right, even on brand-new domains.
Traffic numbers in late 2024 were impressive, with over 122,000 impressions. What stood out to you about those figures?
Those numbers were exciting because they showed real user interest, with niches like Hobbies & Interests leading the pack at over 17,000 impressions. What caught my attention was how mobile performance outpaced desktop, with some domains hitting up to 37% of keywords in the top 30 on mobile. It reinforced how critical mobile optimization is today and hinted that AI content, when indexed, can tap into significant traffic pools, at least in the short term, if it aligns with user search patterns.
Everything changed dramatically in February 2025 when visibility dropped to zero. How did you process that sudden decline?
It was a gut punch, honestly. On February 3rd, all articles vanished from the top 100 search results, and it became clear that initial success doesn’t guarantee longevity. We suspected factors like the lack of domain authority and the absence of human-edited originality played a role. It was a stark reminder that search engines, especially Google, seem to prioritize long-term value and trustworthiness over quick wins, and our team had to dig deep into why this collapse happened so uniformly across all domains.
What do you think this experiment reveals about the role of domain authority versus content creation methods?
This study highlighted a critical divide. On new domains with no authority, even decent AI content struggled to maintain rankings after a few months. In contrast, when we tested AI-assisted content on an established domain with human edits, the results were night and day—sustained impressions and clicks over a year. It shows that domain authority acts as a backbone; without it, the creation method—AI or otherwise—can’t stand alone. Search engines seem to lean on trust signals that new sites just don’t have yet.
How do you see the balance between AI automation and human oversight evolving based on these findings?
I believe the future is a hybrid model. AI is fantastic for speed and scale, as our early results showed, but the drop-off proved that human oversight is non-negotiable for sustainability. Editing for clarity, adding unique perspectives, and optimizing for user intent are where humans shine. Moving forward, businesses will likely use AI as a starting point—a draft machine—but rely on editors to infuse the content with depth and authenticity that search algorithms reward over time.
What’s your forecast for the role of AI-generated content in SEO strategies over the next few years?
I think AI content will remain a powerful tool, but its role will shift toward being a foundation rather than the final product. As search engines get smarter at detecting and deprioritizing unoriginal content, the emphasis will be on blending AI efficiency with human creativity. We’ll see more focus on building domain authority and user trust alongside content creation. My forecast is that within a few years, successful SEO strategies will hinge on using AI smartly within a broader framework of quality and authority, rather than as a standalone solution.
