Ray/Rudzki: "Mount AI" - How AI Content creation fails in the long term

Key Takeaways:

• Ray & Rudzki stress the risk of heavy AI usage in SEO & content creation as they point out examples of failure: "Mount AI" is the rapid increase of visibility that is followed by a rapid decline as Search algorithms catch up

• An analysis of success stories of AI content tool from Landwehr revealed that 57% of websites saw their visibility tank, 22% that successfully gained rapid growth in the short term but tanked after

• Ray highlights:

  • These drops can be really hard to recover from. Recovery can also take a really long time - sometimes years.

  • Google and Bing have had systems in place for years to identify and demote sites abusing their content policies (which Bing just updated yesterday to include AI search manipulation, btw). Their systems are a lot more sophisticated than many people seem to realize…

  • AI can be incredibly useful for improving efficiency in the content creation process-from ideation and outlining to editing, summarizing, and refining language. But we've also seen repeatedly that overreliance on purely AI-generated content, especially when it's scaled quickly without meaningful originality, can seriously damage SEO performance (and ultimately visibility in AI-driven search as well). The key is ensuring AI-supported content still includes unique insights, firsthand expertise, original research, or unique perspectives and opinions that competitors can't also copy-paste from an LLM response.

• Rudzki elaborates on risks of using AI too extensively:

  • 1. Loss of user trust

  • 2. Google can detect poor quality AI content

  • 3. Negative user signals

  • 4. Site-wide quality impact

  • 5. Future algorithm changes

  • He expects:

    • Google and major LLMs will get better at identifying low-quality AI content

    • Original perspectives will matter more than ever

    • Content that actually helps people will be rewarded

• Šulcas observed further AI scale-up success stories turning into dust:

  • SEOwind published 116 AI-generated articles in 30 days in 2025. Said it brought more than 100% increase in impressions and over 70% in clicks. In 2026 they're website is basically deinexed (-99% organic traffic loss)

  • ClickUp published 150 AI-generated articles grew non-branded organic traffic by 85% over 12 months. In 2026 ClickUp's blog went from ~1M organic traffic to 75k. (approx. -90% organic traffic)

  • Userpilot was already a little underwater, so removed 800+ AI-generated articles to increase clicks. In 2026 it is doing best - recently started dropping, losing about 50% organic traffic

• In conclusion: It's all about quality - AI can help speed up, solely AI will fail, quality and information gain are important to win the game - this way you can stay under the radar of artificially pumped up websites

Sources:

• https://peec.ai/blog/the-real-risk-of-ai-generated-content

• https://www.linkedin.com/posts/landwehr_are-ai-content-tools-tanking-their-customers-activity-7432727457323016193-qKCB/

• https://x.com/aleyda/status/2027365692517876044

• https://www.linkedin.com/posts/lily-ray-44755615_this-is-something-ive-been-paying-close-activity-7432806417675501568-uv1O/

• https://www.linkedin.com/posts/tom-loves-data_if-there-is-one-article-you-read-and-bookmark-activity-7432742448814219264-wKm9

• https://www.linkedin.com/posts/lily-ray-44755615_no-better-feeling-than-someone-being-wrong-activity-7432905035539439616--yGJ/