AI-generated content for satellite sites — still working in 2026 or done?

Back in 2022 you could spin up fifty AI-written satellite sites and three of them would stick. The quality did not matter much, the volume did.

I stopped doing it in 2024 when the de-indexing wave hit everything that smelled of scaled content. Now I am seeing people try again with 'humanised' output and I am sceptical.

Has anyone actually made this work in the last six months? Not one good site — I know you can still do that with careful prompting and editing. I mean the volume game. Is it dead or did people just get better at hiding it?

dead

Dead for the old model. The volume game is not the same game anymore.

1. You cannot have the same pattern across fifty sites. That means different AI tools, different prompting strategies, different structures. The labour to manage that defeats the point.

2. Google is now scoring on interaction metrics. An AI article with zero backlinks and zero dwell time dies regardless of how well it reads.

3. The sites that stick are the ones that have something the main site does not — actual original data, screenshots from tools, case studies with real numbers. AI cannot hallucinate that convincingly.

I still run satellite sites, but I run five instead of fifty and I write the content myself.

That is what I figured. Just like 2014 when article spinning died and everyone said SEO was over, then people just adapted.

I found a workaround! Use AI for the structure but fill in the data yourself. Got a gaming site ranking in three months with this hybrid approach!

Which site? Let us see the SERP.

Uh I need to check the exact URL, will post later

Still works — just slower and requires actual work. Same as everything else in this industry.