SEO niche sites and blogging

The claim

”📣 FREE AUDIT ON YOUR SITE - MAKE $10K+ PER MONTH WITH AI🤑 Want to know how to make $10K+ each month from your website using AI SEO? ‼️For 24 hours ONLY, we’re offering a FREE audit on your website to get you ranking #1 on Google & ChatGPT. On this call you’ll get: ✅ Free” (truncated in our copy)

@JulianGoldieSEO, 23 September 2025, 2,894 views¹

Of our 3 tweets, only this one gives an income figure; the text we collected gives no traffic, ad rate or costs¹. This page judges the scheme, not the people who tweeted.

The sums

A niche site is a website on one narrow subject, built to rank high on Google. That work is called SEO (search engine optimisation); in the “AI SEO” version, software writes the articles. Income comes from adverts, placed by ad networks such as Google AdSense, Mediavine and Raptive, and from affiliate links, which pay a commission when a reader buys. Ad income is pageviews ÷ 1,000 × the network’s rate; the claim gives neither.

The best evidence we found on rates is one 2026 survey of 129 bloggers by a site that sells blogging courses, so the rates are probably high¹¹. At its top rate of $42 per 1,000 pageviews (Raptive or Mediavine), $10,000 a month needs about 240,000 pageviews; at AdSense’s $3.26, about 3.1 million (our sums, before costs and tax)¹¹.

A new site starts at the AdSense rate, which has no traffic minimum¹⁷. That figure is for scale: Mediavine’s starter programme opens at 1,000 visits in 30 days from the richest ad markets, so a growing site qualifies for a better rate long before 3.1 million¹².

Ahrefs, which sells SEO tools, found that 96.55% of pages get no visits from Google (2023 data)²⁴. And where Google shows an AI-written answer above the results, Ahrefs puts the first result’s loss of clicks at 58% (desktop searches only)²⁶.

What happens to most people who try

No source gives the share who succeed. In the survey, blogs under a year old averaged $4.44 a month and blogs aged 1 to 3 years $100.35; no age band averaged $10,000¹¹. Averages sit above the typical blogger, and people who quit are unlikely to be in the survey¹¹.

A developer auto-published about 2,300 AI articles with no human review; monthly clicks peaked at 695 and fell to 69⁴⁷. Google’s policy says sites with many pages made to rank, not to help users, “may rank lower in results or not appear in results at all”³⁰. Google allows AI as a writing aid³¹. We found no proof-backed income report from a mainly AI-written site earning near $10,000 a month from ads and affiliate links; that is a gap in our searches, not proof that none exists.

The upside

Empire Flippers, a broker, says it vets its listings⁵⁵. The counts are ours, from its public data; we saw no records behind the vetting⁵³.

• 1,213 content-only sites (earning only from ads and affiliate links) sold since 2014; median net profit, after the costs the seller reports, was $1,720 a month⁵³.
• 66 of the 1,206 with a figure (5.5%) made $10,000 a month or more: about 1 in 18 of sites good enough to sell, not a newcomer’s chance⁵³.
• Most sales are old: by our count, only 39 were first listed in 2024 or later; the broker’s own recent counts are higher (about 50 sold in 2024)⁵³⁵⁶.
• Best recent case: a travel site that first earned in November 2024 averaged $10,227 a month net and sold, with over 90% of traffic from social media⁵³.

A realistic good result (our estimate): close to nothing in year one, around $100 a month after one to three years, and perhaps $1,000 to $3,000 after five or more¹¹⁵³.

What it takes to compete

• Years. The survey’s median wait was 12 months for the first dollar and 48 months for a full-time income, among those who reached one¹¹.
• First-hand material. In one author’s study of 100 blogs named in 2022 lists of high earners, the 21 that kept growing (by a tool’s traffic estimates) had first-hand content, their own audience and a name people search for³⁸.
• Traffic beyond Google. Of nine broker listings that first earned in 2023 or later, six drew mainly on social media, Pinterest, Reddit or newsletters (our count)⁵³⁵⁴.

Cash costs are low: our estimate is $60 to $250 a month for hosting and tools⁶⁶.

How to tell early (our judgement): in an Ahrefs study, only 6.11% of new pages with real content reached Google’s top 10 within a year, and of pages that reached it, 40.82% did so within a month²⁵. So if nothing you publish gets search visits after several months, more of the same is unlikely to help.

Who else makes money from it

The tweet offered a free audit call for 24 hours in September 2025 and named no price; it is not a current offer¹. The website of its author, Julian Goldie, offers link building (getting other sites to link to yours), coaching and memberships².

Tools and hosting charge from month one whether or not the site earns, and pay people who send them customers⁶⁵⁶⁶. Courses, brokers, ad networks and Amazon each take a fee or a share^16195762.