By Bogdan Babiak
Publication Date: 2026-03-23 16:00:00
With AI, you can generate dozens (if not hundreds) of articles in hours and publish at scale. But publishing is the easy part. What happens after they go live is what matters.
Together with the research team at SE Ranking, we ran a 16-month experiment to track how well AI-generated content performed on brand-new domains with zero authority.
As you will see, the results are hard to call a success.
Here’s the full story behind our experiment.
Methodology
The goal was simple: test how far AI content — with no human editing, rewriting, or enhancement — could go in search.
How quickly would it get indexed? Could it rank for relevant queries? Most importantly, could it drive traffic?
We started by purchasing 20 new domains with no backlinks, domain authority, brand recognition, or search history.
Each domain focused on a different niche, covering topics such as:
- Arts & Entertainment
- Business & Services
- Community & Society
- Computers &…
