The AI Workflow scaling evergreen content at Search Engine Land
Find out how this 15-year-old SEO publication cut content production time from four weeks to one by rethinking how humans and AI work together
Welcome back to The Workflow, the newsletter that keeps poking at the messy intersection of humans, AI, and marketing (and everything in between).
A few months ago, Search Engine Land (SEL) did something most publishers and creators avoid: they told the world they were using AI to write a section of their content…and the internet exploded.
Some accused them of killing journalism, others of secretly training models on contributors’ content. A few applauded the transparency.
Behind the storm was an editorial experiment led by Kyle Morley, our guest today. He heads Acquisitions at Semrush and Sales and Marketing at Third Door Media, the publisher of SEL and MarTech (both now part of Semrush. Yes, it’s all connected!).
Their goal was to test how far AI could go in speeding up the production of their evergreen content section without sacrificing the quality and tone their readers love.
To solve that challenge, they built Harmony, a hybrid workflow where AI drafts and humans refine, cutting production time from weeks to days.
This issue gives you a rare look at how a global brand scales content with AI and the bigger questions that come with it.
How much should you scale?
How do you keep quality intact?
How do you communicate AI usage transparently?
How should you adjust your current content ops and team?
…and many more.
✅ What you’ll learn
What an AI-assisted editorial process really looks like inside a top publication
How humans and AI share the work across the content pipeline
SEO writing guidelines that will help you nail that first draft with AI
🧨 What triggered The Workflow
SEL has been publishing trusted SEO and PPC insights since 2006. They cover daily industry news and analysis, trends, expert columns, and the in-depth evergreen guides marketers keep bookmarked for years.
That scope is both a blessing and a curse.
News needs constant coverage and sharp opinions, not something you hand over to AI.
Meanwhile, each long-form guide took three to four weeks to go from outline to publish, bouncing between strategists, writers, and editors. With more than 1M marketers reading every month, the team couldn’t keep up with demand.
Kyle and his team were facing a tricky crossroads.
On one hand, hiring more writers would have boosted output but risked undermining consistency in tone, structure, and quality. Each new writer meant more rounds of edits and reviews, stretching an already slow four-week cycle even further. Instead of solving the problem, scaling the writing team would have only scaled the bottleneck.
On the other hand, keeping the status quo wasn’t an option. Demand for evergreen SEO guides was growing faster than their ability to produce them.
So they turned to AI to solve the dilemma. Instead of expanding the writing pool, they re-engineered the process around editors, the subject-matter experts closest to the audience.
For this type of evergreen content, AI proved surprisingly good at research and first drafts, while editors keep full control over structure and accuracy, adding the expertise and perspective robots can’t fake. The result is the hybrid workflow we’re unpacking today: part curation, part original insight, without reinventing the wheel each time.
And here’s the part we truly love: the efficiency gains went straight back to the humans. Cutting back on external writers freed up budget to increase editors’ salaries, hire real experts, and turn great writers into even better editors.
