Last updated: July 12, 2026
Quick answer. I would use AI as much as I possibly could. I would also refuse to make AI my strategy. Those are two different things, and most people getting started right now confuse them.
This is not a hypothetical for me. I am actually starting from scratch right now. My previous site, a product review site I had built up over years, got crushed by Google’s 2023 and 2024 algorithm updates. Most of the traffic vanished. The audience I had spent years building was gone within a few months.
So when I write “what I would do,” I’m writing about what I’m doing this week, not what I would do in theory. Here’s the honest version.
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Why the AI shortcut path doesn’t actually work
The pitch you’ve seen a hundred times. “Use AI to write 100 articles in a weekend and watch the traffic roll in.” Sometimes it’s 50 articles. Sometimes it’s a single tool that does everything for you. The numbers change. The pitch doesn’t.
This isn’t new either. In 2010 the same idea went by names like PLR content and auto-blog plugins. In 2015 it was article spinners. Same shortcut, different label. AI is just the 2026 version. The shortcut always promises the result while skipping the work.
Here’s what actually happened. Google’s Helpful Content updates in 2023 and 2024 were aimed at sites flooded with low-trust, mass-produced content. The algorithm cast a wider net than that, and a lot of independent reviewers doing manual research work got swept up in it. Mine was one of them, and so were most of my competitors. The whole independent review space took the hit, not just the sites cutting corners. Sites that had gone full AI-flooding got hit even harder. By 2024, low-trust AI-generated content had become an explicit target of Google’s quality updates.
The work the shortcut skips is the trust-building work.
Trust is what readers and search engines eventually reward. Skip it, and you’re building on sand. If you want a fuller breakdown of how to spot the next version of these schemes before you spend money on one, I wrote a separate guide on how to tell if something’s a scam.
What I would focus on instead
Three things, in this order.
First, pick a topic I can speak to honestly from my own experience, not one that happens to pay the highest commission or look trendy this month. Something I can defend with specific examples. If I can’t tell you about three actual situations I’ve lived through, I have no business writing about it.
Second, build trust before trying to monetize. One reader who comes back next month is worth more than 1000 search bots that never will. The math on this is not subtle. Affiliate revenue eventually follows trusted audiences. It almost never follows traffic without trust.
Third, pick a platform I can build on for years, not whichever algorithm is hot this month. WordPress on my own hosting, not a rented Substack newsletter or a TikTok account that could disappear next Tuesday. The platform I own is the only one that owes me nothing and won’t kick me off when its priorities change.
Where AI actually fits in
AI speeds up the work. It does not decide what work to do. That’s the rule I keep in front of me.
Here are the tools I actually use, and what each one is for. Claude is my main one, where I do most of the thinking, drafting, and structural editing. ChatGPT is where I go for brainstorming and quick rewrites when I want a different angle. Gemini handles image and infographic work, while Perplexity is my research tool when I need citations and current sources. Microsoft Copilot is part of my personal Microsoft 365 subscription, useful when I’m already working inside Word, Excel, or Outlook. Cowork I use for project organization across all of it.
That’s six tools. None of them tell me what to build, who to serve, or what to say. They just help me write faster, research faster, and produce assets faster. AI is the chisel, the reader’s question is the wood, and the design is mine.
If you remove the chisel, the work still gets done, just slower. If you remove the design, no amount of AI will save you. If you want to see what reality-tested AI usage looks like in practice rather than in marketing language, the AI Reality Check page walks through concrete examples.
The platform question
I’ve been a Wealthy Affiliate member since January 2016. That’s just over 10 years. I’m still there for reasons that have very little to do with the affiliate program.
WA gives me hosting that’s been reliable across the years, training I can refer back to when I forget something, and a community of people doing the same work who can spot the mistakes I’m too close to see. None of that is glamorous. None of it makes a great sales pitch. All of it adds up over years.
I won’t tell you it’s a quick path to income. It is not. Most people who join expecting fast money quit inside the first few months. The ones who stick around long enough to build something that meaningfully replaces a paycheck are usually two to three years in. That’s what I’ve watched happen for a decade.
I’m deliberately not putting an affiliate link in this post. I have a separate review of Wealthy Affiliate coming, and that’s where the link will go when it earns it. For now you’ve got my opinion at the price of zero dollars.
The strategy hasn’t changed because AI showed up. Build trust over time, pick a platform that can’t kick you off, and be honest about what you can defend with your own experience. Those rules worked before AI and they still work now. AI just changed the execution speed.
If you’re starting from scratch this week, here’s the actual first step. Write down three topics where you have real experience or a strong opinion you can defend with specific examples. Not topics that look profitable on a commission table. Topics you can write 50 posts about without faking it.
That list is where the business actually starts. Not in a tool subscription or a course, but in a doc with three items on it. The tools come after, and they come faster than you think.
One caveat before you run with my plan: it’s the path I would pick, which doesn’t automatically make it yours. The AI Online Business Reality Check weighs your time, experience, and expectations, then points you at the starting path that fits. Five minutes, no email.
If you want more on this, a few related posts. The AI Gap is Real covers what’s actually shifting between people who use AI well and people who don’t. Using AI to Build Income Online: What to Know Before You Start goes into what to know before committing money or time. Getting Started with AI walks through the practical entry points. And ChatGPT Free vs Paid is the post I send people when they ask whether to pay for a tool yet.