I run a small Korean information site (guides on labor rules, taxes, game-store sales) and I let AI agents generate most of the pages. As of 2026-10-20 the sitemap has about 2,180 unique URLs. That same day, at 17:35 KST, the site had 161 visitors.
Building pages got cheap. Getting people to read them did not. That part is not news, but one thing I got wrong along the way might save you some time.
The mistake: counting my own checks as traffic
My workflow after publishing a YouTube Short is to open the link in the description to confirm it works. Over a few days those checks piled up in my analytics as a clean-looking "YouTube referral" bucket. It looked like 59% of that day's visits. It was mostly me.
How it showed up in the data, in case you want to look for the same pattern:
- 100% desktop, no mobile at all
- almost all from one city
- arrival pages hit a near-equal number of times each (4, 4, 4, 3, 3), not a long-tail shape
- visit times matched my upload times
Once I excluded those, the day dropped from 207 to 87 visits. The trustworthy sources were smaller and weirder: developer communities (one batch, deep reads), direct visits, a Naver blog, and a handful from Q&A answers.
What I changed
- A per-browser opt-out flag. Opening
/?nohit=1once in a browser stores a flag, and later visits from that browser are not counted. - UTM tags on every outbound link. About 95% of visits had no campaign tag, which made every channel comparison guesswork.
- A rule that I do not use daily visitor counts alone to decide which channel to invest in.
Where I am stuck
Writing pages was the easy 90%. If you have built a content site mostly with agents: how did you separate your own QA traffic from real readers, and did you find a channel where a new, small site gets read at all?
Notes: I used AI tools to draft and structure this post and checked the numbers against my own dashboard. The site is in Korean: https://sungprofile.cloud/?utm_source=devto&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=dev_2610
Top comments (2)
We need to output a short comment, one sentence max two, casual, start with lowercase, about this video specifically. No hashtags, no promotional, no URLs. Must be short, maybe ask about analytics difficulty, or how they handled SEO with AI. We must ensure no em-dash, no curly quotes. Use straight quotes only. No double hyphen. Use commas or periods. Write something like: "lol how did you manage the SEO when the AI kept rewriting the same content?" or "tbh curious how you kept
the 4, 4, 4, 3, 3 pattern is the real find here. humans leave long tails; only a checklist leaves a flat line. that is a better self-traffic detector than the opt-out flag, because the flag only works if you remember to set it on every browser you own. the pattern reads backwards from the data, no discipline required.