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Scaling AI Content Backfire – Research from Lily Ray
Posted by on May 13, 2026 at 6:53 pmhttps://lilyraynyc.substack.com/p/it-works-until-it-doesnt-ai-content-risks
Lily Ray have been monitoring more than 220 websites that were publicly identified, either by themselves or by their AI content vendors, as customers of various AI content creation, automation, and scaling platforms.
Most of these sites over time became Mount AI (a term coined by Glenn Gabe) and in the article, Lily have shared many graphs showing traffic going up and then suddenly dropping.
Moreover Lily argues that we're in a SEO hype cycle – where scaling content too quickly using AI tooling like ChatGPT/Claude or specific AI content generator SaaS tools becomes popular and a lot of domains get hit then the cycle dies.
Lily also argues that these AI tools can be helpful but in a really limited way.
"None of this means AI content tools are unusable. They can be genuinely useful for research, briefs, internal data synthesis, and accelerating workflows where a human expert is still in the loop. The trouble starts when the goal becomes volume, or when the people closest to the content stop reviewing what is going out the door."What are your thoughts on scaling content? and what you are seeing out there in the market.
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1 Reply
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I wonder what u/WebLinkr thinks of scaling pages too quickly using AI
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Feels like we are back to the early days of Panda. I’m not sure how people think this will work long term.
Sure you got your Rank-and-Tank sites that are just out to make a quick buck, but there are prominent sites doing this that should know better.
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I would like to share some of my thoughts about scaling content?
– using any third party tooling AI content generator SaaS is a bit risky game– publishing AI content with human writing is alright I think but should be careful around how many pages per month
– scaling I think is still alright if you are scaling something which is unique. For example, you may have some unique dataset and you’re using AI to transform that dataset into 1000 pages and you’re right away publishing all those pages. In those kind of situations I think it’s alright but if you’re using just generic information from ChatGPT or Claude and scaling that then it becomes a problem.
– I do think that there will be a specific spam or core update sooner or later which is going to hit a lot of domains which are doing scaled AI content nowadays.
– at the same time, I think brands should be really careful while using tools like AirOps or content generation functionality from Profound, I have reviewed a lot of case studies from these two companies and for a lot of them. It’s almost like this month they launched the project where they started scaling content and just after four to six months, there was a significant drop in search rankings.
That’s why I think brands should be really careful while making a decision about using AirOps or content generation functionality from Profound or any other AI content generator SaaS tool out there. -
We’re seeing so many people present with 1000’s of pages that shot up in a few days and then came crashing back, so you’re timing is impeccable.
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What are your thoughts on scaling content? and what you are seeing out there in the market.I see the roots of this forming in the publisher myth. A lot of Developers seem to hate the idea of Authority – I was too and froing with someone for a day and then they eventually had a meltdown and said “its about CRAWLING – just get your page crawled more often and it will get indexed and ther’s no need for this mythical, magical “authority” bullcrap”.
# Scaled Content = the Auto-Fix All-in-One Button
The thing is – without authority, Google would need magic to operate. And I think that Devs see the results from the GSC graphs posted and go – ah, this is the magical auto-fix-all button I need……
And it works – until it doesnt and your domain is ash….
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useless article. How much scaling are we talking about?
Plus, these type of sites know it already, make money and move to a new domain. -
Need to name names so we can do our due diligence.
Also, let’s see the content! Are the refreshing it and if so, what happens. Are they internal linking? Do the internal links help their target pages rank. Lots more to uncover
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