I Built an AI Tool to Generate SEO Blogs & Pages - Here’s What I Learned

Sanjay Kumar Negi — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 15:01:53 +0000

As developers, we love automation but content creation is still painfully manual for most teams.

I kept seeing the same problem across founders, indie hackers, and agencies:

Writing SEO blogs takes hours
Landing pages are repetitive
Social content is inconsistent
Existing AI tools feel fragmented or overcomplicated

So I decided to build a tool to solve my own workflow problem first and that project became Minineo.

This post isn’t a promo.
It’s a breakdown of what I built, what worked, what didn’t, and what I learned along the way.

The Original Problem

My goal was simple:

Go from keyword → published content with as little manual work as possible.

But most tools:

Generate raw text only
Don’t respect SEO structure
Break when you try to scale
Leave publishing & formatting to you

I wanted something developer-friendly, predictable, and automatable.

The Approach I Took

Instead of one big AI prompt, I split the system into clear stages:

Intent-first content planning
Strict structure enforcement
Usage limits handled server-side
Publishing treated as a pipeline, not a button

That design decision saved me weeks later.

Architecture (High Level)

Next.js for the app layer
Supabase for auth, data, and RPCs
Server Actions for usage enforcement
AI models only handle generation not business logic

Key rule I followed:

Never trust the client for usage limits
Always enforce limits via server-side RPCs

This made the system production-safe early on.

Content Generation Strategy

Instead of “write a blog about X”, the AI gets:

Fixed heading hierarchy
Explicit SEO constraints
Word count bounds
Section responsibilities

This dramatically reduced:

Hallucinations
Fluff
Rewrites

The output became predictable enough to automate publishing.

Media Was Harder Than Text

Text was easy. Media wasn’t.

Problems I hit:

Hotlinking external images (bad idea)
WordPress rejecting uploads
Social platforms requiring different auth models

Solution:

Download → upload → replace URLs at publish time
Treat media as a post-processing step, not generation
This separation kept the core clean.

What Didn’t Work

Being honest a few mistakes:

Trying to support every social platform early
Overengineering UI before workflows were stable
Letting AI decide structure (never again)

Each rollback made the system simpler and more reliable.

What Worked Surprisingly Well

Strict prompts > “creative freedom”
Build-in-public feedback
Treating content like data, not prose
Shipping small, testable pieces

Why I’m Sharing This Here

Dev.to helped me countless times while building this.

If you’re:

Building an AI SaaS
Automating content workflows
Enforcing usage limits properly
Publishing to platforms programmatically

I hope something here saves you time or mistakes.

What’s Next

Next on my list:

Smarter media enrichment
Better scheduling reliability
Even stricter content validation

Still learning. Still iterating.

If you’ve built something similar or hit the same challenges, I’d genuinely love to hear:

What broke for you?
What scaled unexpectedly?
What would you do differently?

Happy to answer technical questions in the comments

Forem: Sanjay Kumar Negi