Ch. 17: The AI-Written Half of My Site Got Deindexed

Ch. 17: The AI-Written Half of My Site Got Deindexed

I ran an honest experiment on my cookware site: 25 posts written by me, 25 generated and lightly edited, same publish cadence, randomized topics so neither got the better keywords.

For four months, parity. Both batches ranked, both earned. I felt vindicated and started planning a 200-post AI scale-up.

Then a March update arrived. The AI batch dropped from an average position of 12 to 47 almost overnight; manual batch barely moved. By June, 19 of the 25 AI posts were effectively deindexed. The total loss was about $640/mo of the site's $1,500.

The tell in hindsight: the AI posts had real keywords but no information gain — nothing in them that wasn't already on page one elsewhere.

Lesson banked: AI content can rank until the moment Google decides it adds nothing new. The defensible moat isn't who wrote it — it's whether the page says something the SERP doesn't already have.