GEO RECOVERY
You scaled with AI. Your rankings went the other way. I can get most of it back.
At some point you were told AI could handle content and links at scale. It was a reasonable bet. The tools were good, the case studies looked real, and standing still felt like the riskier option. Then the traffic curve turned and the AI engines stopped mentioning you at all. I take it from here. I work out what to keep, what to cut, and what order to fix it in, then I run the recovery until the site is back on solid ground.
WHO THIS IS FOR
You already know which pages you are not proud of.
If you published a handful of AI-assisted posts and edited every one of them yourself, you are fine. Nothing here applies to you. This is for the other situation.
Three hundred posts in six months from a pipeline nobody read end to end. A link package that promised placements on domains you never opened. Programmatic pages spun out of a spreadsheet because the margin looked too good to ignore. It worked for a while, which is exactly what made it hard to stop.
Now large parts of the site have been quietly reclassified, and the answer engines skip past you to a competitor with a tenth of your output. You probably have a shortlist of pages you suspect did the damage. What you do not have is the confidence to delete half your site on a hunch.
The damage is almost never spread evenly. It tends to sit in a small group of pages and a short list of domains.
Finding that group is my job, not yours. It happens before anything gets deleted, because recovery is mostly a sorting problem and not a demolition job.
WHAT ACTUALLY BROKE
Two separate failures, usually treated as one.
They came from the same decision and they need different repairs. I handle both. Fixing only the visible one is why so many recoveries flatten out halfway.
The content half
Volume on its own is rarely what did it. When I read through pages like these, what I find missing is anything only you could have written. No first-hand test, no numbers out of your own account, no named person behind any of it. Google reads quality at the site level, so a few hundred pages like that drag down the ones you actually care about.
The link half
This is the half most recovery advice skips, and it is usually where I find the deeper damage. Bulk outreach, paid placements on sites nobody checked, the same footprint across a hundred domains. Those links do not simply stop counting. They sit there as evidence of how the profile was built, and they keep pointing at you long after the campaign ended.
HOW RECOVERY WORKS
I sort it, then fix it in the right order.
I run this end to end. The diagnosis and every judgement call are mine, and my team carries the volume work behind me, so you are not the one deciding which three hundred pages to touch. You get told what I found and what I did about it.
- 01
I separate the three problems
The AI content, the links, and everything unrelated. A migration, a redesign, a core update, a seasonal dip. Most recoveries stall right here, because the whole drop gets blamed on the content and the real cause never gets touched. I work out which is which before anything else happens.
- 02
I triage before deleting
I go page by page and make one of four calls. Keep, rewrite, consolidate, remove. Slower than a bulk delete, and it is the step that decides whether the recovery works, because some of what you published since the switch is still ranking and still earning.
- 03
I put the trust signals back
I rebuild what a generated page cannot fake. Real authors with credentials that check out, evidence from work you actually did, original numbers and screenshots. This is the same material the AI engines look for when they pick who to cite, so it does double duty.
- 04
I line up what comes next
So you are not back here in a year. What gets published, at what volume, who signs off on it, and where AI genuinely helps instead of quietly costing you. AI stays in the workflow. It stops being the author.
WHAT I WILL TALK YOU OUT OF
Three moves that make it worse.
Each one is a reasonable panic response. Each one costs weeks you do not get back, so I would rather you hear it from me now.
Mass deleting
The first instinct is to remove everything published since the AI switch. That usually takes out the pages holding up what is left of your traffic. I remove with a scalpel, never a broom.
Disavowing on instinct
The disavow file is blunt and most sites never need it. Feed it the wrong domains and you have a second problem while the first one is still open. I check properly before anything goes near it.
Rerunning it with a better prompt
Regenerating the same thin page with a sharper prompt gives you the same thin page in nicer words. Writing quality was never what broke.
HOW LONG IT TAKES
Slower than the damage. Faster than starting over.
Anyone promising you a date is guessing. What I can give you is the shape of it. The sorting takes days. The cleanup takes weeks. The trust signals take a few months to be believed, because that is how long the systems reading your site need to see a consistent pattern instead of a sudden change.
The link half is usually the long pole and it moves on its own schedule. I tell you that up front, and I keep you posted while it moves, so you are not sitting there refreshing dashboards and guessing.
Find out what is actually costing you.
One call. You tell me what you published and what happened after. I tell you what I would keep, what I would cut, and where I would start. If it is a fit, I take it from there.