Programmatic SEO still works

In March of 2024 I watched a pSEO site of mine go from 300k monthly pageviews to 14k in nine days. Same site, same pages, same content. Google just stopped showing it. It never recovered.

A few months later, a different pSEO site I run hit a million pageviews for the first time. Same framework, same deploy pipeline, same “programmatic” approach to generating the pages.

Both are true at the same time, and the difference between them is the most useful thing I’ve learned about SEO in the last three years. This is me trying to spell it out, because every time Google runs a big update someone announces programmatic SEO is dead on LinkedIn and I want to be able to link to this post instead of typing the same rebuttal.

The specific kind of pSEO that died

Not all of it. The version that died is the version that deserves to be called dead.

If you scraped Wikipedia, ran it through an LLM to “rephrase,” dropped the output into a template with 50,000 thin pages, and waited for traffic — that site is dead. Google got extremely good at spotting that exact shape around early 2023 and they’ve only sharpened since. The shape is what they can detect: enormous page count, tiny information-per-page ratio, no signal that any human ever touched the content.

My site that dropped from 300k to 14k looked like that. Not because I’d deliberately farmed it, but because over three years it had drifted in that direction. I’d kept adding pages faster than I was deepening them. Google noticed.

Google doesn’t hate scale. It hates thin. The two get conflated in every “pSEO is dead” post I read, and they’re completely different things.

The one test that predicts which sites survive

Here’s the test that would have saved me that 300k site if I’d known it in 2021:

Would I be proud of this page if I’d had to write it by hand?

If the answer is yes — if a human could look at one of my pages and think “oh, someone who knows what they’re talking about wrote this” — the page survives updates. If the answer is “uh, maybe if you squint,” it’s at risk. If the answer is “no, this only exists because templates made it exist,” it’s going to get nuked sooner or later.

Apply that test to KeqingMains, which is technically a pSEO site with thousands of pages. Each page is a character guide, a weapon guide, a mechanic explainer. Each one exists because somebody actually wanted that specific answer, and somebody who cared wrote or reviewed it. I’d be proud to put my name on any of them. The site has been through every major Google update since 2021 and it just keeps growing.

The word “programmatic” describes how the pages get produced. It does not describe whether the pages are worth anything. Those are separate axes, and if you flatten them into one thing you’ll draw the wrong conclusions about what ranks.

What I actually ship differently now

Three things changed in how I build pSEO sites after that 300k-to-14k afternoon.

First, I cite actual data. Numbers, quotes, sources, screenshots. Not “studies show” but “in the March 2024 patch notes, the attack scaling changed from 1.2x to 1.4x.” Pages that know a specific thing the rest of the internet doesn’t tend to survive the updates that flatten the rephrasing farms.

Second, I make authorship obvious. Bylines on every page. A real about page. A consistent voice across the site. If a reader lands and asks “who wrote this and why should I trust them” and the answer is unclear, AI Overviews won’t cite me and Google will eventually stop showing me. This is newer — it wasn’t a ranking factor four years ago, and now it very much is.

Third, I cut ruthlessly. I used to publish everything that could theoretically rank. Now I unpublish more than I publish. If a page isn’t in the top ten for anything after six months, I either rewrite it until it deserves to be, or I delete it. My sites are smaller than they used to be and they earn more.

The part where I eat crow

I’ve had other pSEO sites get hit in the last two years. It’s not a hypothetical. Every time, the common thread was the same: I was pushing the definition of “useful” a little further than it wanted to go. I was making pages that were technically correct, technically answering a question, but that I couldn’t have written with a straight face by hand.

When I failed the proud-by-hand test and shipped anyway, Google eventually caught up. Every time. No exceptions.

That test is honestly annoying to live by, because it caps your output. You can’t ship 50k pages if you’d only have been proud of 5k of them. But the 5k will still be earning in three years, and the 50k won’t.

The bigger point, if you’re deciding what to work on

Programmatic SEO as a free-money glitch is finished. Nobody’s going to 5x a site by spinning up 100k template pages anymore, and if anyone’s telling you otherwise they’re selling you a course.

Programmatic SEO as a legitimate way to structure a content site around a specific problem domain is alive, growing, and maybe more valuable than it’s ever been. The glitchy version got cleared out of the SERPs, which means there’s more oxygen for the real version.

I’m still using it. I’ll still be using it in 2027. I just apply the proud-by-hand test to every page before it ships now, and the 300k-to-14k afternoon hasn’t repeated.