I Used AI SEO to Hit 200K Monthly Clicks from Google (Side Project Breakdown)

1 week ago 4

Hey everyone 👋

I'm Dan — this is my first post on Indie Hackers!

After I left a comment on someone else's post here, a fellow maker asked me to share more about how I used programmatic SEO. So here we are — I’m breaking down one of my past projects where I built an AI-powered SEO engine that peaked at 200,000 monthly clicks from Google.

Comment on indie hacker

Today, it's still getting around 50,000 clicks/month. Here’s how I pulled it off 👇

💡 The Idea

I saw a huge wave on Twitter/X — everyone was launching directories. So I figured… why not try it myself?

I decided to build a site that:

Scrapes Product Hunt launches
Uses AI (LLM) to generate content in a structured JSON format
Translates it into 10 languages
And then publishes SEO-optimized pages automatically

🛠️ The Stack

I created a custom scraper on Apify to fetch Product Hunt launches daily.

Then I passed the scraped data through an LLM (ChatGPT), got structured content, and pushed it through a pipeline that published localized pages in bulk.

Here’s what the whole infrastructure looked like:

TopTool infrastructure

🚀 The Launch

At first, nothing really happened 😅

But then I launched the site on Product Hunt — and surprisingly landed #4 Product of the Day. That gave me a small boost in traffic and started building up my domain rating (DR).

TopTool DR growth

With the DR slowly growing, I began seeing more and more organic clicks from Google.

Here's how ahrefs currently looks like:
Ahrefs

📈 The Spike

A few months in, I checked Google Search Console and noticed one of the keywords had exploded in impressions:

Clicks from Google

That keyword turned out to be a goldmine. From that point on, organic traffic skyrocketed — and so did the monetization.

I started earning $100–$500/month. People paid to submit their own startups and get backlink.

Here’s the overall traffic from Google Search Console:

Google Search Console

You can also check the live analytics dashboard here:
👉 TopTool Analytics

🧠 What I Learned

Eventually, I realized that while this kind of directory was fun to build, it was hard to scale or monetize long term. So I moved on.

But I learned a TON about SEO — how to:

Structure content for ranking
Use programmatic and multilingual SEO
Combine scraping + AI effectively

I’ve since used those learnings to build and open source BlogBowl — a platform to help founders launch SEO-optimized blogs. I’ll share more about that in an upcoming post.