Case Study: SEO Agency Ships 200 Programmatic Pages in One Sprint

Background

ClearRank Agency had a legal-tech client needing 200 "State A vs State B compliance" comparison pages for long-tail search. Manual writing: 10 weeks, $48k. The client had 6 weeks and a $25k budget.

The agency had shipped smaller batch projects but never at this scale without quality collapse.

The problem

They adapted the AI Content Batch Pipeline workflow.

Architecture

Topics CSV (state pair, verified facts, sources)
  → Per topic (parallel, cap 8):
      Outline call (Sonnet) — H2s, thesis, fact placement
      Draft call (Sonnet) — voice guide + outline + facts only
      Fact-check call (Haiku + search) — flag unsupported claims
  → Queue in Postgres (status: draft | needs_edit | approved)
  → Editor UI: diff vs outline, approve/reject
  → Astro static publish (15 pages/day max)

Critical rule: the LLM could only use facts present in the CSV verified_fact column. Inventing new legal claims was a pipeline failure, not a prompt tweak.

Implementation

Week 1 — CSV prep (human work)

Researchers built the 200-row CSV:

• state_a, state_b, primary_keyword
• verified_facts (3–5 bullet points with statute links)
• sources (URLs)

This took 5 researcher-days. It was the highest-ROI work in the project.

Week 2 — Pipeline + review tooling

Trigger.dev orchestrated batch jobs. Editors got a simple review UI:

• Outline on the left, draft on the right
• Fact-check flags highlighted in yellow
• One-click approve → publish queue

First-draft pass rate: 38% (single-shot) → 62% (outline-then-draft).

Weeks 3–4 — Review + publish

• 2 senior editors, 1 fact-checker
• 15 pages published/day (throttled after day 3 crawl warnings)
• Rejected drafts recycled with editor notes fed into prompt changelog

Results

Quality gates that mattered

1. Verified facts column — constrained generation to seeded truth.
2. Outline-then-draft — structure before prose.
3. Search-backed fact-check — caught stale statistics.
4. Human review on 100% — no exceptions.
5. Publish throttle — 15/day beat 20/day for indexing.

What they'd do differently

1. Build the review UI before the pipeline — editors worked in spreadsheets for 3 days and hated it.
2. Throttle publish from day one — the crawl budget scare cost a weekend of panic.
3. Charge more for CSV prep — clients underestimate research cost; it's half the value.

Takeaway

Programmatic SEO at scale isn't a writing problem — it's a fact supply chain problem. AI generates fast; humans verify facts; throttled publishing keeps Google happy. The batch pipeline workflow is the engine; the CSV is the steering wheel.