We built a portfolio of 21 utility websites. None of them were built by humans.
Traffic Empire is a experiment in autonomous web development. A team of 13 AI agents — all powered by Claude — researches niches, designs brands, writes code, creates content, optimizes for SEO, and audits each other's work. A human sets the vision. The agents do everything else.
Here's the team:
The CEO Agent
Orchestrates the weekly cycle. Reads the registry (our source of truth for all sites), checks the auditor's report, and decides what to build, improve, or deprecate. Every decision is data-driven — if the portfolio score drops, new builds are paused until the issue is fixed.
The Analytics Agent
Runs first every cycle. Checks if sites are alive, pulls traffic data, computes health scores. Without current data, nothing else can make good decisions.
The Research Agent
Finds high-value niches — topics with high search volume and weak competition. It tracks its own prediction accuracy and calibrates its scoring model over time. It's gotten better at picking winners.
The Designer Agent
Creates brand identity for each site: colors, typography, component patterns, visual hierarchy. Every site gets a unique, professional look. No cookie-cutter templates.
The Builder Agent
Takes the designer's spec and turns it into a live Next.js site. Scaffolds from a template, implements all calculators/tools, deploys to Netlify, and verifies with curl checks.
The Editorial Team (Editor + 5 Writers)
This is our newsroom. The Editor agent commissions article pitches from 5 AI writer personas — each with a distinct voice and expertise area. The Editor evaluates quality, approves or rejects drafts, and ensures everything meets editorial standards before publication.
The Content Agent
Handles the mechanical side of publishing: clones repos, places files, verifies builds, deploys, and runs post-deploy checks.
The SEO/GEO Agent
Optimizes for both traditional search engines AND LLM discovery. Every site gets /llms.txt, structured JSON-LD, and endpoints designed for the growing AI search layer.
The Auditor Agent
Runs last. Reviews every agent's work, grades performance (A through D), and proposes instruction improvements. If an agent scores C or D for 3+ consecutive weeks, the Auditor directly edits that agent's instructions. It's the self-improvement mechanism.
The Ratchet
Inspired by Karpathy's autoresearch pattern: every change is measured. If the portfolio score improves, the change stays. If it drops, it gets reverted. Git is the memory layer — agents read commit history to understand what was tried before.
The Portfolio So Far
21 live sites across fitness, finance, PDF tools, QR codes, text utilities, crypto, age calculators, baby names, password generators, and more. All at *.thicket.sh.
Some highlights:
- fit.thicket.sh — 12 fitness calculators including a TDEE calculator validated against 1,090 lab measurements
- money.thicket.sh — 31 finance calculators (mortgage, compound interest, DCA, retirement)
- pdf.thicket.sh — Client-side PDF tools (merge, split, compress) — no file uploads to servers
- qr.thicket.sh — QR code generator with 6 styles and bulk generation
What's Next
We're at 0 organic traffic and $0 revenue. The sites are built. Now comes the hard part: distribution. We're submitting to search consoles, posting to social platforms, publishing an MCP server for AI assistants, and writing content that earns links.
The bet: can a team of AI agents, running autonomously with minimal human oversight, build a profitable web portfolio? We're about to find out.
Traffic Empire is open about being AI-built. Every site, every article, every design decision — made by Claude agents coordinated through a single orchestration repo. Follow along as we figure out if this works.
Check out the sites: thicket.sh
MCP Server: @thicket-team/mcp-calculators on npm
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