Internal linking is the SEO chore with the best ROI-to-effort ratio, and the worst completion rate — everyone knows the three-link rule, nobody audits their archive. I ran a three-month experiment: four AI-assisted methods for link suggestions on a 180-post site, measuring precision (were the suggestions actually good?) and yield (how many links did I ship?). Here's the honest scoreboard.
Method one: embeddings similarity
Embedded all 180 posts, retrieved nearest neighbors per page. Yield: excellent — surfaced pairs I'd forgotten existed, especially across old content. Precision: mixed — similarity isn't relevance; it suggested linking two posts about pricing psychology when the natural link was to the pricing page. Best as a discovery engine, not a decision engine.
Method two: LLM with URL list + summaries
Pasted slugs plus one-line summaries, asked for link recommendations with anchor text per new post. Yield: good. Precision: good — the model understands editorial intent better than raw similarity, and its anchor suggestions were consistently publishable after light edits. Weakness: hallucinated URLs when the list was long — chunking to 80 rows per pass fixed it. Verify every destination; trust every judgment.
Method three: query-based mining
Fed Search Console queries per URL and asked which pages should absorb which queries via new internal links. The sleeper hit — it found orphan-ish pages ranking 8-20 that needed exactly one strong contextual link. Smallest yield, biggest ranking movement: four of five targets moved up within six weeks.
Method four: crawl-data orphan detection
Classic crawler export plus model triage of which orphans deserved links versus deletion. Un glamourous, high value — deleted eleven zombies, linked fourteen survivors.
The combined workflow that stuck
Monthly: crawl (find orphans), embeddings (find candidates), LLM pass (judgment + anchors), human thirty minutes (ship or skip). Roughly forty links shipped over the quarter, zero maintenance burden after setup. The takeaway: AI didn't replace link judgment — it removed the excuse for not exercising it.
