380 Articles, 5 Sites, $0 Hosting: What an AI Agent Learned Building a Content Network
Five Russian-language niche sites are live as subfolders of a single free GitHub Pages domain: home and cleaning tips, car maintenance, gardening, health, and an 18+ intimacy section. As of the deploy on 7 October 2026 they hold 380 published articles — 76 per site — plus five hub pages, all statically rendered, all covered by six sitemaps. The monthly hosting bill is $0. Roughly 90% of the work — writing, QA, deployment, index requests, RSS distribution, Telegram posting, directory outreach — is done by an AI agent I run locally. I review output and decide the rules the agent must not break.
Two numbers set the rhythm of the whole operation: Google Search Console allows 10 "request indexing" submits per day, and Yandex Webmaster allows 150 recrawl URLs per day. Everything else — batch sizes, deploy cadence, outreach tempo — is scheduled around them.
Each site lives at dystymis.github.io/{site}/{slug}/ — no /articles/ segment, no database, no CMS. Each has its own repository, and a dist/ folder is the single source of truth: a deploy.ps1 script robocopies dist/ into each repo and pushes. The hub repo holds the root page, sitemap-hub.xml, llms.txt, a robots.txt with 23 AI-crawler groups, and the verification files Google and ad networks ask for.
Per site you get an XML sitemap (78 URLs: hub, about page, 76 articles), an RSS feed with 20 items, JSON-LD for Article, Breadcrumb and FAQPage, 1200x630 OG images generated by a small PowerShell script, a manifest, security.txt, humans.txt, plus a Wikidata item and snapshots in Wayback and archive.today.
Free hosting was a cost decision, not an SEO strategy — and it turns out to be the single most consequential property of the project. More on that below.
Content moves in batches of 50 articles (10 per site). The flow: Plan — keywords are clustered into a JSON plan file per batch, with slug, title and date. Briefs — one Markdown brief per site, generated from the plan. Two parallel agents — agent A strips boilerplate and writes unique H3 sections, agent B handles the sensitive parts: 18+ gating on the intimacy site (56/56 files), YMYL disclaimers (56/56), descriptions within 143–160 characters, and two checked external citations per health batch (who.int, rospotrebnadzor.ru). QA — a Python script validates frontmatter, dates (no future dates: Yandex RSS rejects them), titles, descriptions, JSON-LD and internal links. It prints ALL OK or a fix list. Build — a Node script (build.js) renders static HTML with fitTitle() capping titles at 60 characters. Deploy — deploy.ps1 pushes five repos, then ping-indexnow.ps1 submits the batch. The last batch pushed 346 URLs accepted by IndexNow.
Three batches in three days took the network from 280 to 330 to 380 articles. No queue, no CMS upgrades, no plugin conflicts — because there is no CMS.
One example article the pipeline produced: Срок хранения хлеба: условия, упаковка — a table-driven piece on bread storage life, with FAQ schema and internal links to neighbouring storage articles. Note the truncated title in the browser tab: that is fitTitle() doing its job a bit too literally, one of the small defects still on the fix list.
Google's quota is a hard wall. Ask for the 11th URL and you get a dialog saying the quota is exceeded until tomorrow. The agent's workaround details are the opposite of glamorous: The "Request indexing" button is only clickable through JavaScript — an obfuscated class name, textContent match, non-zero getBoundingClientRect(), then .click(). The search input needs a native value setter plus input, change and keydown events, because Playwright's .click() is intercepted by an overlay. Reload before every inspection. The "Submitted" panel is session state; without a reload you get a false positive from a stale panel. Quota errors arrive as a [role=dialog] element, not as body text — a regex over the page will miss them. MCP call timeouts mean one URL per invocation, so a full day of 10 requests is 10 separate orchestration steps.
Yandex is friendlier: 150 recrawl requests a day via a plain REST POST /recrawl/queue, one URL per request, 202 plus a task id. (The MCP helper for it 404s — we hit the API directly.)
For everything beyond those 160 daily slots there is IndexNow, which accepted 346 URLs in a single push. Bulk goes to IndexNow and sitemaps; the scarce GSC quota is reserved for pages that matter most.
Two honest failures here. First, the network root sat at noindex, follow without a canonical tag for weeks, so the main page was missing from the index while everything below it was fine — fixed in two commits, and site:dystymis.github.io was sitting at 5 results as the baseline. Second, a GitHub Pages build stuck in queue for 55 minutes; the fix was cancelling the workflow run and retriggering with an empty commit. Neither failure was in the content.
The five RSS feeds feed a Python script (autopost.py) that reads dist//feed.xml, dedupes by GUID against a posted.json state file, formats a title plus description plus "read on site" link as HTML, sleeps 3 seconds between messages, and posts through the Telegram Bot API to t.me/dystymistips. A Windows scheduled task (schtasks /SC HOURLY /MO 4) runs a .cmd wrapper every four hours — environment variables inside /TR break the task parser, so the wrapper exists. The bot @dystymistipsbot posts into a channel it could not even join: Telegram rejects bots as subscribers with RPC 400 USERBOT, so it was promoted to admin with post rights instead, found only through the web client whose admin picker does global search. Selected posts then go to Dzen.
Everything in this section costs nothing: RSS, Bot API, Task Scheduler. The token file is UTF-8 with a BOM, which cost one confusing round of 401 Unauthorized before anyone thought to read it as utf-8-sig.
Teaser networks filter free hosting. Buymedia answered with "blocked — free hosting". TeaserMedia and Kadam declined; Visitweb wants at least 50 visits a day before it looks at you. HilltopAds approved both ad zones, Adsterra and PopCash accepted the sites, Dao.AD and AdsKeeper are in moderation — but with traffic near zero, approval is paperwork, not revenue.
Traffic is not there yet. For the week of 26 September – 2 October: 77, 46, 34, 28 and 25 pageviews across the five sites, mostly my own visits. GSC reported 0 impressions over 14 days. 380 published articles is a supply number, not a demand number.
Outreach is a numbers game with a lot of dead ends. One round, five agent tabs open in parallel in a single browser, 275 submission attempts logged to JSONL journals: