SEO study: 54% of sites scaling AI content lost 30%+ of peak traffic
lilyraynyc · x · 2026-11-11
SEO expert Lily Ray highlights an indie developer's post-mortem: one day after publishing an article about redesigning his side project with Claude, Google traffic collapsed — pages stayed indexed, no manual action or warning, but impressions fell from 300/day to 22 and page-one queries dropped to pages 4-6.
It's a pattern, not bad luck: Ray's own analysis of 220+ sites that scaled AI content found 54% lost at least 30% of peak traffic; Glenn Gabe's August-update case studies show the same story at larger scale — programmatic pages plus AI text, then nothing. Her summary: "it works, until it doesn't." She adds dozens of people have reached out with similar situations in recent months.
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