Here’s the complete process I use to publish high-quality AI content on the Ahrefs blog.

I’ll be honest: there are parts of my job that I don’t like.

Writing my 500th article on content gap analysis because we found a new long-tail keyword to target. Listing out the features of 30 free SEO tools for yet another listicle. Updating my old content because a competitor published something new and pushed me out of the top three.

These are necessary hygiene tasks, but frankly, I’d much rather spend my time publishing original research or sharing contrarian opinions.

So—mea culpa—I use AI to speed up these tedious processes. I can condense several days of research, writing and revision into a couple of hours, and spend the rest of my time on fun things.

One of my AI-generated articles.

And despite containing zero words written by a human, these articles perform as well as human-written content. They’re interesting and well-written. In some cases, I actually think they’re better than what I would have written myself.

Here’s the process I use.

Learn about my AI writing process on the Ahrefs podcast

Listen to Ahrefs’ CMO (and my boss) Tim Soulo grill me about this AI writing process on the Ahrefs podcast.

article on LLMs.txt, I wanted to know if any of the major LLM providers had gone on record in support of the protocol (they hadn’t). I set up a deep research request while I worked on other things, read and reviewed the synopsis, and incorporated an AI-generated summary of the findings into the content brief for the article.

AI Content Helper. I use it to analyze the SERP for the target keyword, extract page content from top-ranking articles, and create a list of important subtopics our article needs to cover to be competitive with existing articles.
  • Ahrefs products to mention, particularly any specific or unusual Ahrefs use cases that ChatGPT might not suggest on its own (like mentioning our new MCP server or social media scheduling tool).

    • When I hit enter, ChatGPT heads to the next stage of the process: creating a bullet-point article outline, based on my content brief.

    Do optimization tools actually work?

    If you’re wondering whether content optimization tools are worth the hype, here’s Louise from our blog team adding 65% traffic to an article using our content optimization tool, AI Content Helper. They work!

    weasel words.
  • Include a real example to illustrate your point.
  • Correct this wrong idea.
  • Trim (or expand) this idea.
  • Simplify this and make it beginner-friendly.

    • ChatGPT responds instantly, so even if any single response isn’t brilliant, I can very quickly nudge the writing in the direction it needs to go (as long as I know what “good” looks like). Because I’m already happy with the structure—we reviewed that earlier, during the outlining phase—it doesn’t take long to get the article publish-ready.

    correlation of 0.011—effectively zero. AI content can and does rank highly.

    But it’s still a good idea to monitor your pages and see how they perform, relative to human-written content.

    I use Ahrefs Portfolios feature to track all of our AI-generated articles and quickly see their keyword rankings, backlinks and estimated organic traffic. Here’s one article, looking healthy:

    And I use Ahrefs’ Web Analytics for traffic sources and on-page metrics. Here’s my AI-generated guide to LLMs.txt, generating a respectable 17,200 pageviews with a 72.3% bounce rate…

    …and earning traffic from a healthy mix of sources, including social, email, and AI assistants like ChatGPT and Gemini:

    Not bad for a vibe-written article.

    Final thoughts

    This is not a magic, zero-effort process for creating search content—but it is a process for speeding up the “hygiene” parts of my job and freeing more time for fun, skilled content creation.

    Crucially, I still read, review, edit, and approve every piece of content published on the Ahrefs blog, whether it was written by a person or generated by ChatGPT. Using AI is no excuse for publishing shoddy content.

    Can you spot my vibe-written articles? Let me know on LinkedIn.

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