My AI content bot flooded my blog with 60 posts in one night and Google tanked me

Last month I set up an AI tool to auto-generate blog posts for my marketing site. I thought I was being smart, just feed it some keywords and let it run. Woke up the next morning to find it had published 60 posts overnight. They were all junk, just keyword stuffed nonsense that barely made sense. I panicked and deleted them all right away, but the damage was done. My traffic dropped by 80% over the next week. I spent the last 3 weeks manually rewriting 15 of the better topics and submitting reconsideration requests. Still not back to where I was before. Has anyone else had Google punish them for AI content overload and managed to recover?

2 comments

2 Comments

rivera.henry1mo ago

Holy crap, that is a brutal way to learn that lesson. Sounds like your bot was speedrunning the "how to destroy your site in 24 hours" challenge.

elizabeth_gonzalez1mo ago

The first time I ran a scraper on my own site to test for broken links, I accidentally set the crawl depth to unlimited and forgot to add a delay. It hit like 500 pages in under a minute and basically DDoSed my own shared server. My host suspended me for "suspicious activity" and I had to beg them to reinstate the account. Now I always run things like that from a local machine or a cheap VPS with strict rate limits. Also, I keep a backup of my whole site on a separate host just in case something dumb happens again. Lesson learned the hard way.