How I’m automating my online business with AI

Welcome to another edition of my bi-weekly newsletter!

This time, I want to share what I’ve been working on to get one step closer to automating my online business with AI.

Maybe some of what I’ve learned will help you save a few hours of work too.

But first, let me share what pushed me to start doing this in the first place.

A few weeks ago, I was sitting at my desk late at night, almost midnight, thinking about why life felt so damn busy.

So I did the math.

I spend about 40 hours a week at my full-time job. On top of that, I spend roughly 20 hours a week running my online business, and then there’s everything else that comes with, well, being a person.

Basically, when most 9-to-5 people close their laptops, I start my second shift.

And my online business has grown far beyond just running Behind Rankings.

Double income? Great.

Double the time? Not so great.

I came to the conclusion that having two jobs that both require a lot of brainpower is probably only sustainable for a limited time. You can borrow energy from your future self to get more done today, but you can’t keep doing that forever.

So, if I’m going to do this for now, I want to make the most of it.

And this is where AI automation comes in.

The internet is full of AI automation content these days, and honestly, it can give you serious FOMO if you’re not doing it.

But when you’re working two jobs, even getting a few hours back every week can make a huge difference. I’m sure you know what I mean.

I have several big areas of work that I deal with on a regular basis.

So, if you’ve ever wondered what running a website and an online business actually looks like behind the scenes, that’s roughly it.

I’ve also highlighted the tasks I’ve already automated, either fully or partially.

And that list still doesn’t include everything else on my plate, like this newsletter, writing my AI SEO ebook, and working on website UI and UX.

Content writing is still a big part of my workload. And honestly, I’m fine with that. I actually like writing. I have things I want to share, and I’ve always had a pretty high bar for the content I put my name on.

There’s already enough AI slop on the internet. I don’t need to add more to it.

That’s also why I still want my content to feel human, even though I do use AI in my writing process.

I’ll share more about the different processes I’m automating in future newsletters. But today, let’s talk about social media.

This was one of the first things I wanted to automate for a couple of simple reasons:

And even though I put less time into social media than I do into my website content, I still care about the quality. My name is attached to it. My brand is attached to it. So I’m not interested in publishing generic AI-generated posts just because I want to save time.

So, how do I automate it without letting the quality go to hell?

Here’s what I’ve been doing.

I built an AI marketing agent using Gumloop’s agent builder to handle a big part of my social media workflow.

For the second month in a row, it has been creating my entire monthly social media content plan.

Here’s a preview of some of the posts it generated so you can judge the quality yourself.

None of these posts were manually edited. They were generated using the skills I built for the agent.

Visuals are also generated as part of the content plan:

Here’s how the AI marketing agent works:

1️⃣ Every month, I give the agent 5 -7 links to new or updated posts on Behind Rankings.

2️⃣ It turns them into a monthly content plan for Facebook, LinkedIn, and Threads, with a new post every 2-3 days.

3️⃣ The skills control post length, tone of voice, visuals, and more.

4️⃣ The skills are constantly updated based on my feedback.

5️⃣ Once the content plan is generated, I manually review every post and visual before scheduling.

6️⃣ At the end of the month, the agent analyzes the results to see what worked and what didn’t.

𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘂𝘀𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝗮𝗸𝗲 𝗺𝗲 𝗮𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗮𝗻 𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝘁𝗼 𝗰𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝗾𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗽𝗼𝘀𝘁 𝗻𝗼𝘄 𝘁𝗮𝗸𝗲𝘀 𝗺𝗲 𝘂𝗽 𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝘄𝗼 𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗿𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝗰𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗿𝗲 𝗺𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗵 𝗼𝗳 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁.

That’s a pretty good trade-off for a solo founder with a full-time job, don’t you think?

I’ve been improving the agent for the past two months by giving it good and bad examples and showing it what I want the final output to look like.

I’m really happy with the text it produces at this point.

The visuals are a different story. They’re still a work in progress because getting an AI agent to understand what makes a visual actually good is harder than I expected.

For now, this automation works really well for Facebook, Threads, and LinkedIn.

It creates the text posts, auto-comments, and visuals. No video content, though.

Instagram Reels still require me to get in front of the camera and shoot the videos myself. 😅

There’s another tricky part to know about scheduling and publication.

If you use a paid social media management tool that provides API access, you can potentially connect it to an AI agent and automate scheduling and publishing months in advance.

That means you could eventually remove the manual scheduling step completely.

The problem is that free tools usually don’t give you API access.

I currently use Ahrefs’ free Social Media Manager to schedule my posts. The tool itself is free, which is great, but you need a paid Ahrefs plan to get an API key for automation.

And the other paid tools I already use, including Canva and Semrush Social Media Toolkit, don’t give me what I need for this particular workflow either.

I really don’t want to spend my time manually scheduling social media posts forever.

So, the next step is finding a free, or at least affordable, social media management tool that can connect to my AI agent and handle this part for me.

If you know a tool that could work, please share it in the comments. I’d love to test it.

I also made a short Instagram Reel about this automation. If you found this useful, a like and follow would mean a lot - Behind Rankings on Instagram. ❤️

Every two weeks, I round up and share the biggest updates from the AI SEO world so you can stay on top of the latest changes and what's coming next. 👇

A new analysis from AlsoAsked looked at 19.2 million English queries and found that 97% of People Also Ask answers in the first week of September were generated by AI Overviews, up from 86% in August. 🙈

For context, Barry Schwartz, from Search Engine Roundtable, noted that this share was only around 12% about 14 months ago.

It’s especially harmful for site owners since PAA has been a reliable source of long-tail impressions and clicks for content sites.

But if almost all PAA answers are now generated by AI Overviews, there’s a lot less reason for people to click through to the sites behind those answers.

Zero-click search with fully AI-generated answers? We are probably heading there.

Something seems to be off with Google’s reporting. 👀

Google Business Profile Insights is currently missing all September data, even though we’re already eight days into the month.

There are also some reports on Reddit about the issue, but nothing official from Google yet.

And that’s not the only thing!

The Search Console Links report hasn’t been updated for about a month either.

No word from Google on either issue so far. Hopefully, the missing data will be backfilled soon.

Source: Search Engine Roundtable.

Some advertisers are starting to see Google’s new AI-powered dashboards in Google Ads. 👀

Google first showed off these Gemini-powered dashboards back in May. Then, in August, Google said they would start rolling out soon.

Looks like the rollout is finally happening, and some advertisers are already seeing them in their accounts.

This new AI-first reporting layer could become the main way advertisers look at their Google Ads performance going forward.

And that matters because the way AI summarizes your data can influence what you decide to focus on next.

Do you see AI dashboard in your Google Ads account? 🤔

Image credit: Thomas Eccel on LinkedIn.

Google Search seems to be rolling out a new 𝗴𝗼𝗼𝗴𝗹𝗲.𝗰𝗼𝗺/𝗴𝗼𝘁𝗼 URL format in its search results. 👀

Google started testing it back in July 2026, and now it looks like it’s appearing more widely.

This might be one way to make it harder for third-party tools and AI companies to scrape Google Search results.

When you hover over a URL in the search results, Google uses a goto URL parameter before taking you to the website instead of linking directly to the page URL.

🚨 Google rolled out its August 2026 spam update globally across all languages from August 18 to August 21, 2026. 🫠

The good news: it’s a “normal” spam update, not a core update.

Spam updates are supposed to improve Google’s systems for detecting and handling search spam.

Have you seen any traffic 📈📉 for your website?

For $9.99, my ebook shows you how to create content that aligns with Google's E-E-A-T (Expertise, Experience, Authority, Trust) and gets cited — your biggest edge in the AI era.

Inside, you'll learn:

If you want your content to perform over the long term, not just exist, this is for you.

That’s all for now!

Talk soon,
Victoria

P.S. To learn more, check my full collection of newsletters for free: Behind Rankings.