In April 2026, I launched Bring the Pups, an SEO editorial site that answers the questions dog owners actually ask about specific parks: is it fenced, is there water access, is it good for puppies, does it get muddy after rain. It's live at bringthepups.com with roughly 600 published park pages across 56 cities.
The site is also an experiment. I built it as the reference implementation of a hands-off content engine, with the architecture split into two strict layers. Layer 1 is deterministic retrieval: idempotent scripts that seed parks from the Google Places API, push curated photos to a CDN, and merge re-runs without ever clobbering an editorial field. Layer 2 is AI curation, where Claude writes the editorial content, gated by hard-banned vocabulary lists and an AI-tell linter that blocks the phrases language models overuse.
Since AI-written content at volume is one bad deploy away from turning into slop, I enforce quality at the one place it can't be skipped: the build. The Netlify build command runs a 12-stage QA suite on every deploy, so broken internal links, duplicate titles, oversized images, or banned copy fail the build and the last good deploy stays live.
Search Console became the feedback loop. Weekly pulls showed park pages landing on page one for specific-park queries, with one Seattle park at position 1.8 and a 23.8% click-through rate, while city pages stalled behind the Google Maps pack. So I flipped the strategy: park pages are the product, and city pages are internal-link hubs pointing into them. The site currently ranks at position 3.2 for "dog park near me."