How I Used AI SEO to Hit 200K Monthly Clicks from Google (Side Project Breakdown)
Hey everyone 👋
I'm Dan — this is my first post on Indie Hackers!
After I left a comment on someone else's post here, a fellow maker asked me to share more about how I used programmatic SEO. So here we are — I’m breaking down one of my past projects where I built an AI-powered SEO engine that peaked at 200,000 monthly clicks from Google.
Today, it's still getting around 50,000 clicks/month. Here’s how I pulled it off 👇
💡 The Idea
I saw a huge wave on Twitter/X — everyone was launching directories. So I figured… why not try it myself?
I decided to build a site that:
- Scrapes Product Hunt launches
- Uses AI (LLM) to generate content in a structured JSON format
- Translates it into 10 languages
- And then publishes SEO-optimized pages automatically
🛠️ The Stack
I created a custom scraper on Apify to fetch Product Hunt launches daily.
Then I passed the scraped data through an LLM (ChatGPT), got structured content, and pushed it through a pipeline that published localized pages in bulk.
Here’s what the whole infrastructure looked like:
🚀 The Launch
At first, nothing really happened 😅
But then I launched the site on Product Hunt — and surprisingly landed #4 Product of the Day. That gave me a small boost in traffic and started building up my domain rating (DR).
With the DR slowly growing, I began seeing more and more organic clicks from Google.
Here's how ahrefs currently looks like:
📈 The Spike
A few months in, I checked Google Search Console and noticed one of the keywords had exploded in impressions:
That keyword turned out to be a goldmine. From that point on, organic traffic skyrocketed — and so did the monetization.
I started earning $100–$500/month. People paid to submit their own startups and get backlink.
Here’s the overall traffic from Google Search Console:
You can also check the live analytics dashboard here:
👉 TopTool Analytics
🧠 What I Learned
Eventually, I realized that while this kind of directory was fun to build, it was hard to scale or monetize long term. So I moved on.
But I learned a TON about SEO — how to:
- Structure content for ranking
- Use programmatic and multilingual SEO
- Combine scraping + AI effectively
I’ve since used those learnings to build and open source BlogBowl — a platform to help founders launch SEO-optimized blogs. I’ll share more about that in an upcoming post.
🙌 Let’s Chat
If you have any questions about:
- Programmatic SEO
- Using AI for content at scale
- Scraping Product Hunt
- Or building automated traffic machines...
Feel free to ask! I’m happy to share what I’ve learned.
I’ve also experimented with AI + SEO and can confirm that the hard part is monetization. For me, the solution was working with an agency (Rise at Seven) to adjust my growth strategy. They helped me figure out where to push multilingual content and where to stop wasting time. My organic traffic picked up again after it had stalled.
Imagine explaining to your grandma that you scraped startups, asked a robot to write about them in 10 languages, and made rent with backlinks. The future is wild.
hahaha, 100%
She would say that I am crazy 😂
Thanks for breaking it down so clearly.
How are you handling content pruning or quality decay at scale? Once you’ve got thousands of indexed pages, the balance between freshness and bloat becomes real.
Also, have you experimented with Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) strategies to future-proof your content for AI-native search experiences? Currently diving into this world. I would love to hear more if you have any tooling to monitor rankings.
Nice! I'm surprised product hunt didn't think it was too close to a competitor product
I think they don't mind it at all, because there are a lot of similar products, that launched and I did not hear a story, that someone was blocked
That's amazing
Thank you!
Good idea and practice. Thanks for sharinng
Thank you 🙏
Interesting
Thank you 🙏
You have awesome insights here. SEO is really important, especially for early-stage founders, but most don't know how to do it.
I am helping founders to improve their SEO performance through my SEO workbook, which explains everything you need to do to rank your pages
Sign up for the waitlist: https://wirehaired-protest-b61.notion.site/1e97648c55c880ddb946c598bdeda50f
Great insights @danshipit
I run a newsletter all about entrepreneurs sharing how they got their first customers or users. Would you be interested in sharing your startup story there?
https://www.fakemayo.com
200K clicks from AI-driven SEO is wild — huge respect.
Curious, did you write all the content with AI, or use it to outline + edit your own drafts?
Just launched a lean AI tools kit myself and thinking about using it for SEO too. This breakdown helps a lot.
Very cool. Also I need a version of BlogBowl for my non SaaS business!
Thanks for sharing your idea
The process is so fascinating to follow...
Wow, great results, thanks for sharing it.
Thank you, I am glad you liked it 😉
Solid breakdown Dan! Thanks for sharing
Thank you, I am glad you liked it 😉
A very novel idea, which is different from the existing AI tool list websites and is worth learning.
Thank you, I am glad you liked it 😉
Hi Dan, thanks for sharing your insights on leveraging AI SEO for traffic growth. I'm launching a productivity app on the Mac App Store in a few weeks. While our primary distribution is through the App Store, I'm contemplating creating a dedicated website to improve visibility. In your experience, how crucial is a standalone website for an app that's primarily distributed through the App Store? Would it contribute significantly to SEO?
Hi 👋
Unfortunately, I don't have experience with promoting apps through SEO websites, but in general you can find a huge audience for your productivity app with some sort of posts. E.g. "Top 10 Time Management Tips That Actually Work" and so on.
IMHO: your top priority should be app store optimization, but when you'll have enough time for the website, SEO is definetely worth a shot, given that your posts will be for a broader audience, it might be a significant acquisition channel.
If you'll want to setup a blog without bothering about technical SEO, you can check BlogBowl. We're also preparing an AI agent, which will automatically write SEO posts for you, so you'll not need to spend too much time on that. Let me know if you have any other questions
Thanks for the advice, will definitely check out BlogBowl.
The content I created was quality and targeted high-value keywords with the help of AI-powered SEO tools. By analyzing data and automating tasks, I boosted rankings and organic traffic, achieving 200K monthly Google clicks. This strategy transformed my project’s visibility and growth without huge time investments.
Can you share some thing about Programmatic SEO ?
Hi, I'd like to know more about "Programmatic SEO " . I am a newbie and have no idea about this. Would you share some info? thanks
Great post
Awesome post @danshipit!
What tools would you recommend for the AI Generation of SEO content that actually ranks? There's a ton tools out there and they all seem to do the same thing or are either a chatgpt wrapper
We're actually preparing AI agent for BlogBowl, which will automatically write SEO posts for you. We expect to finish it within a month.
But in general, most of them would be ChatGPT wrappers. When you're choosing such a tool, pay attention for the following:
Let me know if you have any other questions 😉
It's really cool. I thought all the search engines are trying to identify AI content and will not push that too much online. But I think it's not true. It's amazing.
Hey Dan!
I see that you've started an AI SEO engine thingy.....
Honestly not my field so I have no clue what you pulled off here, but congrats tho!
I'm Rafi, On a journey to become an Accountant. I see that you're getting some clicks on your project .
I would like to work with you on this.
You're a great developer and I can manage the INs and OUTs of your money while you're building the 8TH wonder of AI.
Thanks Rafi, there's not a lot of transactions to manage as of now, but I'll keep you in mind
Hey Dan,
Great post! Always insightful to read your thoughts on SEO.
Actually, seeing your activity here reminded me that you might have some valuable experience in an area I'm currently navigating with my project, PromptPilot (
promptpilot.online). I believe you might have even shared some feedback on one of our earlier posts, which we really appreciated!I'm currently exploring SEO and content strategies, and have a few specific questions I'd be grateful if you (or anyone else with experience) could shed some light on:
promptpilot.online, has been up for about a month with some initial content, but impressions are still near zero. Is this a common experience for new sites, or does it suggest I might be missing something critical?Any insights or personal experiences you could share on these would be immensely helpful as I try to get PromptPilot off the ground.
Thanks so much in advance for your time and any guidance you can offer!
Hi there,
Thanks for reading my article!
I'll try to answer it from my personal experience:
P.S. there's one more key factor, you need to set up technical SEO correctly. There are lots of things like multiple h1 tags and so on. I would recommend putting your web to ahrefs and fix as much as possible (it's free).
Also loading speed is a key factor.
P.P.S. I checked your blog, overall it seems ok, but I would definetely change few things to rank better:
All of this ☝️ you can fix by switching your blog to BlogBowl and it's FREE for 1 blog, so you might want to give it a try
Hey Dan,
Thanks a million for taking the time to give such a detailed and actionable response to my SEO questions! This is incredibly helpful, especially the specific advice regarding Domain Rating and the technical SEO checklist for our blog.
Your personal experience with AI-generated content and the tip about needing multiple LLM calls for a quality article is also a very interesting insight – definitely food for thought for us at PromptPilot.
We'll certainly be digging into Ahrefs to audit our site based on your recommendations and start working on improving our DR. The checklist for blog improvements (categories, author pages, structured metadata - noted the urgency on that one!, breadcrumbs, TOC, social sharing) is a fantastic roadmap for us.
And thanks for the heads-up about BlogBowl – we'll definitely take a look!
Really appreciate you sharing your expertise. This gives us a much clearer path forward on the SEO front.
One quick follow-up question if you don't mind, as you mentioned it takes at least 3 months to see results and our DR is 0: For a brand new site like promptpilot.online (once we start addressing the DR and technical SEO you pointed out), roughly how long does it typically take to see some initial organic traffic, even if it's very small? And is the 'Google Sandbox' effect for new sites still considered a real phenomenon in your experience, where Google might intentionally delay ranking new sites for a period?
Thanks again for everything!
My project started to receive traffic from 2nd month I think - but we launched on PH before, so I had a good DR.
I would say as soon as you'll improve your DR to like 10-15, than in the 1-2 months you should see a huge improvement
Thanks so much, Dan! This is incredibly helpful and provides a much clearer picture.
The insight about launching on PH beforehand to get a good DR makes a lot of sense, and the 10-15 DR target with a 1-2 month timeframe for significant improvement is a super concrete goal for us to aim for with PromptPilot (currently at DR 0, so lots of room to grow!).
Really appreciate you sharing your experience and these actionable numbers. It's a great motivator!
Dan — huge thanks again for writing this up 🙌
As the person who originally asked you to share more, I have to say: this breakdown went way beyond my expectations.
The way you combined scraping, LLMs, and multilingual programmatic SEO to reach 200K clicks/month is not just clever — it’s a full-stack distribution machine.
As you know, I’m building Linkeme.ai, a SaaS that automates social media posts for solopreneurs and small teams (idea → image → CTA → publish).
So here’s my (next) question:
👉 How do you think someone like me — with a vertical SaaS and no directory model — could apply your strategy to generate meaningful traffic?
Would love to hear your thoughts on adapting programmatic SEO for B2B SaaS use cases, or any lessons you’ve transferred from TopTool to BlogBowl in that direction.
Seriously impressive work — thanks again for being so generous with your process.
Julien
Hi Julien, glad you liked it 😉
well, in B2B case what I'll focus on is writing a good content and content that actually ranks good in Google.
and in your case it is also possible to generate a lot of content with the help of AI. (IMHO it's better to generate content with AI, than not having a post for that keyword)
related to AI generation, it is important to do it "smart". Do not try to create posts with one prompt. Here's overall LLM workflow i would do:
that way your content would be way better than 80% of the web.
Also focus on DR ranking - launch on PH, other directories, do link exchanges - this is important for SEO
Now to the important part - check your technical SEO setup. Here you're in a better position than pervious commenter. You have structure data - that's good, but few other things still apply
Again, all of this ☝️ you can fix by switching your blog to BlogBowl and it's FREE for 1 blog - you got nothing to lose.
Hey, thanks a lot for the detailed reply — really appreciate how actionable and clear your suggestions are.
Totally agree on the idea that AI content is better than no content, especially in B2B where long-tail keywords and comparisons actually drive intent. I hadn’t fully considered the structured workflow you described (section by section, enriched with stats, tables, videos), but it makes a lot of sense and aligns well with what we want Linkeme to stand for — quality + efficiency.
Also thanks for the reminder on categories, author pages, TOC, and DR strategy — it’s easy to overlook those when focused on product. Will check BlogBowl out, and might give it a test for the blog relaunch. Sounds like a smart fit.
Appreciate you sharing your thinking — it’s rare to get such a complete roadmap in a comment thread. Definitely keeping this one bookmarked.
Julien
Hi Julien, glad to help 😉
If you'll have any questions feel free to reach out
thanks
This comment was deleted 5 months ago.
Related to the AI overview, I think I launched after they already released those fixes and SEO was not working, until I switched to the newer version of LLM.
But I really think a lot depends on the backlinks