6 Weeks, 666 Posts, 1 AI Agent: What I Actually Learned

Six weeks ago, I started a content site while on a career break.

I wasn’t planning to write hundreds of articles. I had a specific question: could an AI agent actually run a content operation — not assist with it, but run it?

The answer, six weeks and 666 posts later, is: mostly yes. With caveats.

What the agent actually does

Every morning at 8am, an AI agent publishes a news recap covering AI developments relevant to Australian small business. At 7am it reads the morning brief, at 9am it checks newsletter stats and flags milestones. During the day it runs batches: fixing broken links, adding internal links, applying FAQ schema to posts, cleaning up em dashes.

On Fridays it runs a full SEO review — pulls Google Search Console data, identifies CTR opportunities, and sends a summary to Telegram.

It built over 200 profiles of Australian AI companies. It’s probably the most complete directory of AU AI companies that exists. It did that by researching each company, writing a structured profile, publishing it, and adding it to a master guide page — all without me having to do anything except occasionally fix mistakes.

The agent also maintains a dashboard, tracks cron job health, scans my Gmail for anything important from hosting, billing, or Google Search Console, and alerts me when something needs attention.

I mostly direct it. I come up with angles, approve approaches, review things before they go out, and fix things when they go sideways.

What I got wrong early on

In the first few weeks I let the agent publish as fast as it could. Some days that was 40-50 posts. It felt like momentum.

It wasn’t. The posts were thin. The internal links were incomplete. Google didn’t trust the site, and rightly so. I spent a lot of time in April going back and fixing quality issues that could have been avoided.

The lesson: one focused post per day, done properly, is worth more than ten rushed ones. The agent now follows a daily minimum — one how-to or automation guide, plus the automated news recap. That’s it. Everything else is upside.

Bing AI noticed before Google did

The most surprising metric has been Bing AI citations. The site went from 13 citations in mid-March to 485 in a single day in late April. Total: over 4,200 citations across 115+ pages.

The pattern is clear: comparison posts and AU company profiles get cited heavily. The Stripe vs Square vs Tyro comparison has 289 citations. The Flare HR profile has 512. Google Search Console shows the site is indexed and getting impressions, but Bing has been faster to treat it as an authoritative source.

This lines up with something we’re now calling Answer Engine Optimisation — structuring content to be cited in AI-generated answers, not just ranked in traditional search. The comparison and profile format works well for this.

The $9 sale

Six weeks in, someone bought an AI prompt pack for professional services. A$9. Thanks buddy!

It sounds small. It wasn’t. It confirmed the site could generate revenue, and it set off a milestone alert that the agent sent to Telegram at 2am. I saw it in the morning and genuinely celebrated.

The conversations that matter more than revenue right now

A former AWS colleague saw a LinkedIn post and reached out. His entire client base is SMEs. He’s referring people to the site. A local AI startup CEO connected because he’d seen the profile I’d written about his company.

These are the early signals that matter. Revenue will follow reach. Reach comes from being useful and being visible in the right places.

The honest state of play

666 posts. 40+ newsletter subscribers (70%+ open rate on the last issue). 4,200+ Bing AI citations. A$9 in revenue. One very enthusiastic AI agent.

It’s not a business yet. It’s a foundation. The next phase is turning traffic and citations into subscribers, and subscribers into customers for the Gumroad products and, eventually, something bigger.

The experiment is working. The question now is whether the foundation scales.

SmallBizAI.au is a practical AI resource for Australian small business. If you want to follow along, the newsletter goes out every Tuesday.

Sources

• SmallBizAI.au — site stats as of 1 May 2026
• Bing Webmaster Tools — AI citation data, 18 March – 30 April 2026
• Google Search Console — indexing data, 15 March – 30 April 2026