Automating SEO with AI: what works, what doesn’t and where to start

Automating SEO with AI means software takes over the recurring work on your website: finding issues, rewriting titles and descriptions, adding internal links and measuring what it brings in. You set the direction and check in where you want to. It works well for anything that follows fixed rules and can be undone. It does not work for your offer, your prices or your own story.

I run a marketing agency in the Netherlands and I build the software behind GreatCompany, so I see both sides. My view: most of what a small business pays for SEO every month is work that software now keeps up with better than a person. That says something about the kind of work, not about the people doing it. There is a lot of it, it is dull and it comes back every week.

What exactly is SEO automation?

With SEO automation, software does three things you would otherwise do yourself, or pay an agency for.

1. Look. The software fetches your pages and reads your numbers from Google Search Console. That shows which pages Google displays and where few people click.
2. Choose. Out of hundreds of possible improvements, it picks the few that bring in the most right now.
3. Do. It writes the new title, description or link and puts it on your site. Or it proposes it to you.

The first step has existed for twenty years. Every SEO tool can produce a list of issues. The difference is in steps two and three. A language model can read a page, understand what it is about and write a title that fits the search query. In 2022 that was not good enough to leave unsupervised. Now it is, for part of the work.

There is another meaning in circulation. Some people mean generating hundreds of pages at once. That is called programmatic SEO and it is something else entirely. When it works and when Google steps in is in programmatic SEO.

Which SEO tasks can you automate?

Not everything lends itself equally well. This table is my own breakdown, after a year of building the software.

Task	Easy to automate?	Why
Rewriting page titles	Yes	Fixed rules, measurable in Search Console, one field
Writing meta descriptions	Yes	Often empty, low risk, direct effect on clicks
Adding internal links	Yes, within limits	Works well when the software reads the content, poorly with simple keyword matching
Filling in alt texts	Yes	A lot of work, little debate about the result
Finding technical issues	Yes	A scan finds them in minutes
Fixing technical issues	Partly	A redirect can be done, your theme or server cannot
Measuring and reporting	Yes	Fetching and comparing numbers is arithmetic
Choosing keywords	Partly	AI groups and sorts, you know what a customer is worth
Writing blog posts	Partly	A first draft can be done, the facts and your experience must come from you
Your offer and your prices	No	That is your business, not an SEO task
Getting links from other sites	No	That takes contact with people

The top five together are most of what an agency does on the site itself for a small business client. The approach per item is in writing an SEO title, meta description, internal links and alt text.

What happens if you keep doing it by hand?

Take a landscaping company with 38 pages. Every page has a title, a description, a few images and links to other pages. That is more than two hundred fields.

The owner fills them in when the site is built. After that, nothing happens. Two years later the page about garden design is still called “Services”. Four new blog posts link nowhere. And Google shows the site in position 9 for “landscape design” in their town, just below the fold.

He knows it could be better. He just does not have a Monday morning for it. For the vast majority of small businesses that is the issue: the knowledge is there, the time is not. And an agency solves it for an amount a four-person landscaping company cannot justify.

How automated SEO works in practice

Here is how we built it. Other tools differ in places, but the order is always the same.

A scan every week. The software fetches all pages. Connect Search Console and your numbers come along: impressions (how often Google shows your page), clicks and positions, per page and per query.

A choice based on return. A page in position 8 with 900 impressions and 6 clicks goes before a page nobody sees. That is where a better title pays off fastest.

At most five improvements a week. That is deliberately few. Change forty titles at once and after a month you will not know which change did anything. With five a week you can follow the effect per page.

You choose per item. Titles, descriptions, internal links and alt texts can each be set to Automatic, Approve first or Off. The title and description of your homepage always come to you for approval first.

An email with what changed. Old and new side by side. Do not like something? Restore the old version with one click.

After four weeks, the measurement. Did the page get more clicks than in the four weeks before? That is in your overview.

For the landscaper, after the first Monday the page is called “Landscape design and installation in [town]: plans and pricing”. The four blog posts now link to that page. He did not have to do anything.

Software that works this independently is called an agent. What that means for your website and where to draw the line is in AI SEO agent.

Automating SEO in WordPress

To publish automatically, software needs access to your site. In WordPress that works through a plugin. It reads your pages and writes the new title or description into the field of your SEO plugin, such as Yoast or Rank Math. Your theme and layout stay as they are.

That is why automated SEO is mainly a WordPress thing right now. On our own Dutch site about investing it has been running since October 2026. A page that was called “Index investing → Introduction for beginners” now has a title along the lines of “What is index investing? Explanation and step-by-step plan for beginners”. That and other real changes are on the page about automating WordPress SEO.

Which other AI plugins exist and what they do and do not do on their own is compared in AI SEO plugins for WordPress. For pages built with Elementor, Elementor SEO covers what to watch. For an online store there is WooCommerce SEO.

No WordPress? Then everything works up to the proposal. You put the new copy into your system yourself, or send it to your web developer.

What you should not automate

There are three things you are better off not letting go.

Having whole pages rewritten. An AI that rewrites your services page removes exactly what made it yours: the example of that one client, your way of saying things. Let titles and descriptions go automatically and keep the body copy in your own hands.

Publishing a blog post every day. It is possible, and there are tools that sell it. Google has a policy against it when the articles mainly exist to rank. One article a month with your own facts does more than thirty articles nobody proofread. How to do it right is in having AI write your blog.

Changing URLs. A new URL for an existing page breaks all old links, unless there is a redirect. Good software never touches your URLs.

The rule of thumb I use myself: automate what you can undo in one click. Everything else comes past a person first.

What it brings, and how fast

You usually see a new title back in Google within two weeks. Whether it brings more clicks you know after about four weeks. Higher positions for new topics take longer, often months. The timeline per type of improvement is in how long SEO takes.

Two users of Briljant, our platform in the Netherlands, as an example, with numbers from their own Search Console. The first went from 51 to 182 clicks a month between March and September. The second from 81 to 155 clicks a week between July and October. The screenshots are on the WordPress page.

Small improvements stack up. Five a week is more than two hundred a year. No agency with an eight-hour monthly package comes close to that.

Automate, do it yourself or hire an agency?

	Do it yourself	SEO agency	Automate
Cost per month	Your own time	A retainer, often thousands of dollars	Around $100
How often something happens	When you have time	When there are hours for it	Every week
Who decides	You	The agency proposes	You set it up once
Strong at	Your own story	Strategy, links, large sites	The recurring work

The full calculation is in what SEO costs. Considering a fixed monthly fee with an agency? Read SEO subscription first. And if you really want to do it yourself, DIY SEO shows what you can achieve with two hours a week.

An agency still makes sense. For a large online store, a migration to a new site or a market where you need links from other sites, you want a person who thinks it through with you. For the HVAC contractor, the physical therapist and the landscaper, the basic work is the problem. That can now be done for a fraction of the price.

Start in four steps

1. See where you stand. Have your site scanned. You want to know how many pages have no description, which titles Google truncates and where nothing links to. You can do it yourself with the steps in SEO audit.

2. Connect Search Console. Without numbers, software chooses on gut feeling. With numbers it picks the pages that almost rank.

3. Start with approval. Set everything to Approve first for the first weeks. You see what the software proposes and whether it sounds like your business. If it does, switch titles and descriptions to Automatic.

4. Look at the clicks after four weeks. Your positions say little at that point. Compare the clicks per changed page with the four weeks before.

After that there is little for you to do. Read the Monday email, and ask a question now and then when something catches your eye.

Can your website become findable automatically?

The question business owners ask is often this: can my website not simply become easier to find on its own? Partly, yes. Software can make an existing site a little better every week, without you sitting next to it.

There does need to be a foundation. Google needs to be able to read your site and your pages need to be about something. A three-page site without text will not be found, automation or not. If your site is nowhere in Google yet, start with getting your website found on Google. After that, automation makes sense.

Automating for Google and for AI

More and more customers ask their question in ChatGPT or see an AI overview above the Google results. The work overlaps for the most part. A page with a clear title, the answer at the top and good internal links is also read better by AI.

Measuring is different, though. Search Console does not show whether ChatGPT mentions your business. You measure that with a prompt tracker: it asks your customers’ questions in ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity every day and records who gets mentioned. The two meanings of AI and SEO are explained in AI SEO.

See what can be automated on your site

Join the waitlist and your free report shows which issues we find on your site, which ones we can fix for you, and whether ChatGPT mentions you or your competitor. On WordPress you also see what GreatCompany can publish for you every Monday.