Programmatic SEO, Explained for Beginners

It provides a way for companies to create thousands of website pages targeted at thousands of keywords—without having to design, write, and publish pages manually.

Companies like Canva and Notion use programmatic SEO to generate millions of pageviews each year.

Programmatic pages are built from data like product prices, weather, or location information, with one page for every row in the dataset.

Creating them at scale used to be a job for web developers.

Now an AI assistant connected to SEO data can do most of it, and the rest is judgement: picking the right keywords, the right data, and the right things to say.

We'll show you how.

Using Ahrefs Site Explorer data, we’re able to see a site’s programmatic content growth and organic traffic growth side-by-side.

Here are some sites that seem to be getting it right.

NutriScan’s multilingual nutrition directory

URL: <https://nutriscan.app/calories-nutrition/> Estimated pages: ~4K Estimated monthly organic traffic: ~182K

NutriScan is an AI food scanner and calorie-tracking app.

Its four main language folders grew from roughly 100 ranking pages in October 2025 to ~4K in July 2026.

In all, it attracts ~182K monthly organic visits by targeting the long tail of food-name searches combined with terms such as “calories,” “protein,” “nutrition,” and “weight loss.”

It has programmatically created thousands of pages for individual foods, restaurant menu items, and branded products, then reproduced the directory in Spanish, French, and German.

From a moussaka to a McDonald’s McChicken, every page follows a similar kind of template, featuring:

Calories and macronutrients
Health benefits
Myths
Substitutions
FAQs

Ad Hoc News’ stock-news directory

URL: <https://www.ad-hoc-news.de/boerse/news/> Estimated pages: ~72K Estimated monthly organic traffic: ~1.74M

Ad Hoc News is a German news site that publishes stock-market stories at scale under /boerse/news/.

The directory expanded from about 14K ranking pages in August 2025 to 72K in July 2026 and now attracts an estimated 1.74 million monthly organic visits.

Pages cover individual companies, share-price movements, earnings, analyst commentary, and other market events.

Each headline combines a company or ticker with a timely event. Think: stock rising, falling, reaching a record, or reacting to earnings.

For example, here's a story about Meta’s stock and AI spending and another on Nvidia’s share price and AI demand.

Canva’s feature pages

URL: <https://www.canva.com/features/> Estimated pages: ~310 currently ranking Estimated monthly organic traffic: ~13M

Canva creates feature landing pages targeting searches for specific design tools and capabilities, like photo editors, video editors, PDF converters, and AI-powered tools.

The directory grew from just 23 ranking pages in early 2022 to ~310 today. Organic traffic grew even faster, rising from ~20K monthly visits to roughly 13 million over the same period.

These pages have a repeatable architecture that Canva can generate across hundreds of different tools and features.

For example, its background remover page follows the same basic structure as other feature pages, with a feature-specific headline, benefits, examples, FAQs, and calls to action that take visitors directly into the tool.

The copy seems to be more bespoke than classic database-driven programmatic content, and is likely individually edited, even if AI assists with its creation.

But the repeatable page architecture means Canva can systematically target hundreds of feature-specific searches without building every landing page from scratch.

Notion’s template category directory

URL: <https://www.notion.com/templates/category> Estimated pages: ~600 currently ranking Estimated monthly organic traffic: ~204K

Notion is a productivity and collaboration platform.

In late 2024, it launched hundreds of template category pages, growing from almost no ranking pages to more than 500 in just a few months.

Organic traffic grew just as quickly, rising from almost nothing to ~140K monthly visits by early 2025, and eventually reaching ~204K today.

These pages are programmatically created around Notion’s template inventory, targeting use cases like product management, marketing, personal finance, and website building.

Rather than manually writing a landing page for every use case, Notion’s content scales with its template catalogue and category taxonomy.

QuillBot’s AI writing tools library

URL: <https://quillbot.com/ai-writing-tools/> Estimated pages: ~130 Estimated monthly organic traffic: ~464K

QuillBot has built out a library of AI writing tools, with dedicated pages targeting specific writing tasks and use cases.

The library went from virtually no search presence in early 2025 to ~464K monthly visits in August 2026.

What's interesting is that the traffic growth didn't require constant page additions. Once the initial build was done, the pages (~130 of them) kept earning more traffic from the same URL set.

Every page targets a user need (write an email, generate a title, create a cover letter) and sits within QuillBot's tool ecosystem, with links to complementary tools and optional paid upgrades.

Before you hit publish on thousands of pages, it's worth considering the words of Google's John Mueller: “Programmatic SEO is often a fancy banner for spam.”

Any company that publishes a huge number of very similar pages runs the risk of creating thin content: content that offers little to no value to the end user.

Like any other page, programmatic content needs to satisfy user intent (and not violate Google’s spam policies).

Head to LinkedIn and you'll see many examples of sites that have tanked in Google for this very reason.

Lars Lofgren has spent months begging people to stop doing programmatic SEO, after seeing company after company whose rankings got demolished once they scaled into the thousands of pages.

And Lily Ray thinks certain programmatic page types become a liability rather than an asset once a site scales far enough, and has tracked over 70 companies caught in Google's early 2026 updates after scaling content.

Not everyone agrees programmatic content is worth avoiding, though.

Zak Perez has a client who scaled AI content across 10,500 pages, and saw consistent, across-the-board ranking gains over the course of years and throughout multiple Google updates.

And our own Director of Content Marketing, Ryan Law, makes a related case for scaling something other than articles: Ahrefs' free tools are consistently among our highest-traffic pages, holding steady even as AI answers eat into clicks elsewhere.

Searchers want to do something, not read about it, and a calculator is a lot harder for Google to summarize out of existence than a paragraph is.

Marketers keep declaring tactics like pSEO (programmatic SEO) worthless the moment they get more complicated, which cedes the opportunity to whoever sticks around.

According to our own research, publishing at scale is only a risk if you don't have anything worth publishing at scale.

Final thoughts

Creating programmatic SEO content is no mean feat, but it’s a lot easier lately with AI.

In order for your content to rank—and actually help people—you need relevant, original content and data to share.

The combination of “scalable” keywords and great data is a force to be reckoned with.

With a little know-how, it’s possible to generate thousands (even millions) of pageviews from a single page template. Pretty cool.

Post byLouise Linehan

Louise is a Content Marketer at Ahrefs. Over the past ten years, she has held senior content positions at SaaS brands: Pi Datametrics, BuzzSumo, and Cision. During this time, she has published hundreds of blog posts, spearheaded industry-leading research, and developed expert-led webinar programs.

Louise first learned the ropes of SEO during her time at enterprise SEO company, Pi. Within weeks of joining, she had published a piece on cannibalization that caught the attention of the biggest name in SEO at the time: Rand Fishkin. Since then, she has written on topics ranging from manipulative link building, to content syndication, and search demand forecasting. In her spare time, she has deepened her practical understanding of SEO by building websites for two local businesses.

You can read Louise's words in industry publications like Search Engine Watch, The Drum, The Telegraph, and Spin Sucks.