The Content Farm Hype Is Back, Thanks to AI  

If you spend any time on LinkedIn, you’ve probably noticed a buzzword making the rounds again: Programmatic SEO. A familiar promise that maximizing content output will bring huge benefits on the SEO front, regardless of quality. Google Trends shows searches up more than 500% this year. In August 2024, there were just five LinkedIn posts on the topic; by August 2025, there were seventy-two. Clearly, it’s having a moment (again).

Why now? Generative AI has made it cheaper and easier than ever to churn out content at scale. Where traditional content requires time, expertise, and budget, AI can create thousands of pages almost instantly. For anyone chasing traffic, the temptation is obvious.

But here’s the question: is this time different, or are we just replaying an old story?

We’ve Seen this Boom & Bust Before in 2009

Around 2009, "content farms" like Suite 101 and Demand Media dominated search results by publishing enormous quantities of low-cost, shallow articles. Their business model was simple: churn simple SEO-optimized content on countless topics, prioritize quantity over quality, and generate advertising revenue from the resulting search traffic.

This extremely one-dimensional strategy was dismantled by Google's "Panda" update in 2011 (and then again with the "Penguin" update). Panda was an algorithmic change specifically designed to penalize websites with thin, low-quality content. As a result, content farms saw their search rankings and traffic collapse almost overnight. This event forced a major shift in the SEO industry, ending the era of mass-produced, low-value articles and compelling creators to focus on high-quality, user-centric content to rank successfully.

And we saw it fail again in 2023…

In 2023 we again, see content-churning sites driving massive growth only to lose it when Google cracked down on scaled, low-quality content.

• ZoomInfo ballooned traffic through programmatic tactics, then lost 60% almost overnight after a 2023 update.

• G2, the software review site, leaned heavily on programmatic SEO. Since the 2024 update targeting scaled content, it has shed roughly 80% of its traffic.

• GetInvoice went from millions of clicks to virtually none after a penalty.

The pattern is clear. Programmatic SEO (aka 'Content Farms') can deliver big spikes in the short term, but it’s fragile & 1 dimensional. When Google tightens the filters, the traffic collapses.

Why Wise Worked – and Others Didn’t

That doesn’t mean programmatic never works. Wise, the international money transfer service, is the exception that proves the rule.

Instead of flooding the web with articles, Wise built programmatic pages with a clear function: enter an amount, and you instantly see the equivalent in another currency. The value is in the task the page enables, not in rehashed text.

That difference is everything. Functional programmatic SEO, pages that help users complete an action, is durable. Informational programmatic SEO, pages that just rearrange text, rarely lasts.

That’s why Wise has grown steadily, while ZoomInfo, G2, and GetInvoice have stumbled. When pages provide genuine utility, they hold up. When they don’t, they crumble.

If Google Summarizes, Why Should You?
Generative AI changes the scale, not the fundamentals. It can generate endless articles, but it can’t add original thought. At best, it reshuffles what’s already out there. And now there’s another problem: Google is doing the same thing itself.

AI Overviews pull from multiple sources, combine the content, and serve users a ready-made answer at the top of the search results. In effect, Google is running its own programmatic SEO at massive scale.

And here’s the irony. Google urges site owners to create unique, human-reviewed content – while its own AI pumps out generic summaries with a noticeable rate of errors.

So even if your AI-driven content avoids penalties, it still has to compete with Google’s summaries. And that’s a battle you won’t win.

Long-Tail Promises, Weak Results

Some argue the answer is long-tail keywords: use AI to generate content for thousands of niche queries that would be too costly to cover manually. On paper, it sounds efficient. In practice, it rarely works.

Google doesn’t care who wrote the text. It cares whether the page adds value. That’s where AI falls short. It can’t generate real expertise or new insights.

GetInvoice proves the point. Its pages were fully AI-written. The issue wasn’t that Google “caught” the AI. The issue was that the pages didn’t add anything useful. Traffic vanished as quickly as it came.

Google has even said as much. They don’t intend to penalize AI content outright, but they will demote content that looks like it was pumped out without human oversight. Pages without fresh input quickly lose visibility.

ZoomInfo’s Traffic Spike Was a Mirage

ZoomInfo & Suite 101 show how fragile growth can be when built on a single mass-produced tactic. After shrinking its marketing team from 26 to just 2 people, it leaned heavily on AI-generated campaigns.

For a moment, it looked like a win. Between July and September 2025, site traffic jumped 107% – thanks in part to keywords you definitely wouldn’t want in a board report. Much of the growth came from thin, programmatically generated content, including irrelevant and even porn-related queries. It’s a strategy begging for a penalty.

And ZoomInfo has been here before. In 2023, they lost 60% of organic traffic after a Google update punished similar tactics. They tried again, and the result looks just as precarious.

For other businesses, that should be a flashing red light. AI can inflate traffic charts, but if it’s built on shaky foundations, it won’t hold.

Traffic Isn’t the Same as Growth

The obsession with raw traffic isn’t new. A decade ago, SEOs churned out “what is” articles to capture broad terms. I know – I played that game myself as an intern in 2016.

I revived a company blog with explainer posts and pushed them hard on Pinterest. Traffic spiked, dashboards lit up, and my boss was delighted. But when I checked the metrics, the glow faded: bounce rates over 90%, no conversions, hardly any clicks to product pages. The spike was noise, not growth.

That’s the same trap many SEOs are still in with programmatic today. Numbers that look impressive but do nothing for the business. The metrics that matter aren’t pageviews – they’re branded searches, conversions, and engagement.

Shortcuts Fade, Guidelines Last

Some SEOs see Google’s guidelines as limits and look for loopholes. But short-term hacks rarely last. One penalty can wipe out years of work, and recovery isn’t guaranteed. Even if you fix everything, you’re stuck waiting on a manual review you can’t control.

A better approach - the one taken at Muhlert Digital - is to treat SEO like long-term investing. Quick wins are like day trading: exciting, but risky. Steady, value-driven content is like long-term investing: slower at first, but stronger over time.

AI won’t change that. It can remix the past, but it can’t create the future. And any strategy built on cookie-cutter pages spun up at scale is always one update away from collapse.

Real SEO Wins Come From Originality

Programmatic SEO isn’t dead. Wise proves it can work when it delivers genuine value. But the dream of cheap, automated content at massive scale is as risky as ever –especially now that Google itself is in the summarizing business.

Ultimately, the message is this: Don’t chase illusions of easy growth. Focus on originality, substance, and metrics that matter. AI can help you move faster, but only human insight can tell you where to go.