Invasion of AI tools for SEO that promise a lot
SEO on Autopilot?
SEO on Autopilot?
Photo by: Growtika / Unsplash
I don’t know what your social media feeds look like, but mine feels fully sponsored by AI-powered SEO tools. Some guy or girl munching on chips, showing a laptop screen with their tool magically ranking your site. Not just in Google, it also gets you cited by ChatGPT and its other LLM friends.
Tools like: Outrank. Soogle. Dozens of other platforms with landing pages full of green charts climbing nicely to the right. The message is always the same: connect your site, press a button, and traffic starts flowing. AI publishes optimized articles, gets backlinks, tries as much as possible to imitate what used to happen “back in the day,” when people actually worked to write something interesting, had opinions, and Skynet hadn’t joined the party yet.
You can relax. Maybe on a beach in the Maldives. While AI builds your empire.
The problem is not that these tools are completely useless and you’ll just make the developers richer. The problem is this: if Google and the LLMs don’t catch on now (spoiler alert: they do!), they will detect these manipulation attempts in the future without any trouble.
Outrank, AI-Written Articles, Automated Backlinks and Other Nonsense
Case in point: Outrank integrates with Ahrefs and pulls Domain Rating, the famous DR. Their credit system is based on this score. If you have DR 50, you receive 50 credits when you link to someone inside the network. Later, you can receive equivalent links from other domains. It looks like an internal authority economy, almost mathematical.
To understand what’s going on here, we need to go back in time a bit.
Years ago, Google had a public score called PageRank. It was a simplified representation of how the algorithm evaluated a page’s authority based on links. PageRank was displayed in the toolbar and became the currency of SEO. Everyone tracked it. Everyone hunted it.
Then Google removed the public PageRank display. The internal algorithm obviously remained, but the score was no longer visible. In its place came third-party metrics: Domain Authority from Moz, Domain Rating from Ahrefs, and others.
DR is essentially an estimate of a domain’s authority based on the backlink profile seen by Ahrefs. It’s their own mathematical model, not an official Google signal. Even so, in the absence of public PageRank, DR became the new currency.
Outrank uses DR as a unit of exchange. It makes sense from their perspective. It’s a popular metric, relatively well correlated with backlink strength. But it remains a third-party estimate. Google does not use DR. Google uses its own model, far more complex and granular.
When we start building entire ecosystems based on redistributing a score calculated by an external tool, we need to realize we’re playing a game on two different levels: the public one, with DR and pretty charts, and the real one, with internal signals we don’t see.
The Network and the Mathematics of Graphs
Technically, Outrank is not a classic PBN. Sites are hosted separately, members join and leave, content is published on their own infrastructure, and linking can be randomized. It’s a modern, more sophisticated version of authority redistribution.
But the internet is a graph. Nodes and edges. Domains and links. A natural web has chaotic distribution, diverse sources, asymmetric relationships and unpredictable timing.
A controlled ecosystem, even a large and dynamic one, can still develop distinct properties: higher internal density, increased probability that members link to each other, correlated growth patterns, communities detectable through clustering algorithms.
Google doesn’t need to issue mass penalties to deal with such structures. It’s enough to identify subgraphs with statistical properties different from the broader web and reduce the value of links inside them. Not necessarily manual penalties, just weight adjustments.
In the short and medium term, a well-randomized system can work very well. In the long term, any sufficiently dense and coherent subgraph develops a mathematical signature. And any signature can be modeled.
On top of that, in the case of Outrank, they could be caught even more easily: all the AI-generated images included in their articles come from the same CDN.
Perfectly Optimized and Completely Interchangeable Content
Beyond graphs and DR, there’s a deeper issue. Content generated at scale through these tools starts to sound the same. It’s correct. It’s fluent. It’s impeccably structured. It has clear subheadings, lists, FAQs and polished conclusions.
But it has no voice.
When hundreds of sites use the same keyword gap engines, the same language models and the same optimization logic, the difference between them becomes minimal. You read one article on one domain, then another, and it feels like you just went through the same piece rewritten with small variations.
This is not spam in the classic sense. It’s something more subtle: uniformity.
The web didn’t become relevant because it was perfectly optimized. It became relevant because it was diverse, imperfect and personal. Now we risk ending up with an internet that is technically correct from an SEO standpoint, but completely interchangeable.
Another Tool Showing Up in Ads: Soogle
Comparatively, Soogle takes a more direct approach. It promises 20–25 backlinks per month through a combination of manual work and automated processes, on platforms like Reddit, Medium, Product Hunt and various directories. It’s a strategy based on presence on high-DR domains.
The discussion here is simpler. A high DR domain does not automatically mean real value for the specific page. A profile link or a strategically planted mention is not the same as an editorial link earned naturally.
If Outrank builds an ecosystem of authority redistribution based on DR, Soogle bets on volume and dispersion across well-known platforms. Google and LLMs certainly do not consider these links highly relevant. A link from a forum profile or Substack doesn’t carry real SEO weight.
Conclusion: If You Want a Business, Not Just Growth Charts
I’m not naive. I understand the temptation. I understand why these tools sell. They’re fast. They scale. They give you a sense of control and offer something very seductive: speed.
But speed is not the same as foundation.
If you want to build a business with a life horizon longer than 6–12 months, things change radically. A real business needs trust, reputation, brand, differentiation, people who return, not just traffic that comes and goes.
You don’t build that from DR-based credit exchanges or mass-generated articles following the same template. You build it from real content, written thoughtfully, with opinion, experience and a distinct voice. Sure, you can use AI for editing or generating a structure that you then refine. But it has to breathe new information, authentic data and personal opinions (if it’s a blog).
Google can model graphs.
It can dilute links.
It can adjust weights.
It can ignore dense subgraphs.
But it can’t easily ignore brand. It can’t ignore direct searches. It can’t ignore people who return because they trust you.
AI can be a tool. Automation can be an accelerator. But if you completely outsource thinking, voice and strategy, you’re not building a business. You’re building an experiment dependent on an ecosystem you don’t control.
In the long run, the only real and sustainable advantage is authentic content. Written by hand. Thought through. Different.
What do you think?
P.S.: These tools are basically wrappers around APIs from Ahrefs + OpenAI, Claude or whatever LLM is fashionable at the moment: a nice UI, a scheduler, a layer of prompt engineering, and behind it all an API call to OpenAI / Claude / Gemini
This article was originally published in Romanian on my blog. You can read the original version here.