From Side Project to 200K Monthly Clicks: How One Developer Used AI SEO to Build a Traffic Machine — Daniil Poletaev built TopTool, a Product Hunt directory powered by AI-generated content in 10 langua

From Side Project to 200K Monthly Clicks: How One Developer Used AI SEO to Build a Traffic Machine

SarvaSEO · · 4 min read · seo, ai, case-study, programmatic-seo, indie-hacker

In early 2024, Daniil Poletaev — a backend engineer at Apify based in Prague — built a side project called TopTool. Within months, it was pulling in 200,000 monthly clicks from Google. No ads. No outreach campaigns. Just programmatic SEO powered by AI.

Here is how he did it, what worked, what didn't, and what you can learn from it.

The Idea: A Multilingual Product Hunt Directory

TopTool is simple in concept — a directory of tools scraped from Product Hunt, enriched with AI-generated content, and published across 10 languages. Dan built a custom scraper on Apify that fetched new Product Hunt launches daily, then ran each listing through a structured ChatGPT pipeline to generate SEO-optimized pages.

The languages covered: English, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Russian, Korean, and one more unconfirmed. Each tool page existed in all 11 versions, plus category pages and comparison articles. The estimated total: 55,000 to 110,000+ pages.

The Secret: 20-30 LLM Calls Per Article

This was not a "paste a prompt into ChatGPT and publish" operation. Dan's workflow used 20-30 API calls per article across multiple stages:

  • Research — Pull the top 5 articles already ranking for the target keyword
  • Outline — Generate a structured outline based on competitive analysis
  • Section-by-section writing — Each section written individually, not the whole article in one prompt
  • Citations and statistics — Add references and data points
  • Media — Find and embed relevant YouTube videos
  • Tables — Generate comparison and data tables
  • Images — Add relevant visuals

His advice: "Do not try to create posts with one prompt." The multi-step approach produced content that Google actually ranked.

The Tech Stack

The Launch and Growth

On March 29, 2024, Dan launched TopTool on Product Hunt. It hit #4 Product of the Day with 325 upvotes. That initial domain authority boost from Product Hunt was critical — it gave the site credibility that helped Google start ranking the programmatic pages.

A few months in, one keyword exploded in Search Console impressions. Traffic snowballed. By mid-to-late 2024, TopTool was at 200,000 monthly clicks.

The Monetization Problem

Here is where the story gets real. Despite 200K monthly clicks, revenue was only $100-$500/month. The model: startups paid $19.99 to submit their tool and get a do-follow backlink across all language versions.

That is roughly $1-2.50 per 1,000 clicks — extremely low RPM. The traffic was broad and low-intent. People browsing a tools directory are not buyers. Dan's own takeaway: "The hard part is monetization, not traffic."

Community reaction on Indie Hackers was mixed. Some praised the transparency. Others questioned if this was just a sophisticated content farm. One commenter accused him of "racing for the bottom."

What Happened Next

By May 2025, TopTool had declined to around 50,000 monthly clicks — still running on autopilot. Dan had moved on. He spent 365 days building BlogBowl, a SaaS platform that productizes everything he learned from TopTool.

BlogBowl's AI pipeline is even more sophisticated — 50+ API calls and roughly 1 million tokens per article. It includes Google research, competitive outline generation, section writing with citations, YouTube embeds, AI-generated images, People Also Ask extraction, forum discovery for content promotion, and automatic internal linking.

He open-sourced it on GitHub (Ruby on Rails, 130+ stars) and launched on Product Hunt in October 2025.

Key Takeaways for SEO Builders

  1. Programmatic SEO works, but quality matters. Single-prompt AI content gets deindexed. Multi-step pipelines with 20-30 calls produce content that ranks.
  2. Multilingual expansion is a multiplier. 10 languages turned one page into 11 ranking opportunities. If your content works in English, translate it.
  3. Product Hunt launches build domain authority. The initial PR boost from a top-5 placement gave Google a trust signal that helped programmatic pages rank faster.
  4. Traffic without intent is nearly worthless. 200K clicks at $100-500/month revenue. Always think about who is visiting and whether they will pay.
  5. Build the tool, then build the platform. Dan's TopTool experiment taught him everything he needed to build BlogBowl — a more sustainable business model.

Dan's Links

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