Experiment Zero: IsThisNormal.me

Brain racing at night. Purchase anxiety. Arguments that feel circular. These are the queries ranking on a site I built in two days.

IsThisNormal.me is an experiment: over 1,000 pages of empathetic answers to uncomfortable questions, generated entirely by Claude. The premise is simple. People go to the internet for answers they're too embarrassed to ask aloud. I wanted to know if an LLM could meet them there; if AI-authored content could rank organically and teach me about SEO in practice.

The work took two days. The real effort was upstream: defining the audience, the content strategy, the pillars and subcategories that would give Google something to crawl. Here's what I've learned so far.

The Bet

I'm betting on three things.

Primo: open-ended emotional questions resist AI summary cannibalization. When someone searches "is it normal to feel anxious after a big purchase," there's no concrete answer for Google to scrape and surface in a snippet. The question invites exploration, not a fact.

Secundo: people seeking reassurance read multiple sources. Even after encountering an AI summary, someone wondering if their experience is normal will click through. They're not looking for information; they're looking for validation. That requires more than a paragraph.

Tertio: Claude can write with emotional intelligence at scale. This is the controversial one. I've spent enough time with these models to trust their capacity for nuance and empathy. The question isn't whether the output is good; it's whether readers can tell the difference, and whether they care.

If I'm wrong on any of these, the experiment fails quietly. A site that never ranks, never gets clicked, and fades into irrelevance. I timeboxed accordingly.

Why This Seemed Feasible

The market exists. Quora and r/isthisnormal serve millions of people asking these exact questions. The difference: those are platforms for interaction. I'm building for readers, not participants. Someone who wants to lurk, find their answer, and leave without logging in.

Content-first sites are low-stakes and high-signal. No app to build. No user accounts. No payment infrastructure. Just pages, indexed by Google, surfaced to strangers. If the content resonates, I'll see it in Search Console. If it doesn't, I've lost two days and learned something about SEO.

For two days of simple work and a $10 domain registration fee, it seemed like a worthy pursuit.

How I Built It

The site is static: Astro, TypeScript, deployed to Cloudflare. Nothing fancy. The interesting work happened before I wrote any code.

I started with "pillars." I chose twelve broad categories that capture the emotional territory people explore when they're wondering if something is normal: relationships, health, work, money, sleep, identity. Each pillar branches into subcategories; each subcategory contains dozens of articles. The URL structure mirrors this hierarchy for crawlability 🕸️

Content generation runs through Claude Code skills I wrote for this project. An authoring skill generates topics with a specified distribution, another performs the writing according to a style guide, and an editorial skill reviews output against content guidelines. The guidelines matter because, without constraints, LLM output drifts toward generic reassurance. I wanted specificity, emotional precision, and a consistent voice across 1,000+ pages.

I'm sitting on capacity I haven't deployed yet; the constraint now is Google's willingness to index, and not my ability to generate.

Early Results

Two weeks in. Here's where it stands.

Google has served 73 impressions with an average position of 17.3. That's page two; not bad for a site that didn't exist a month ago. More encouraging: several pages are cracking the first page. "Is it normal to study hard and still do poorly" sits at position 9.9. "Is it normal for arguments to feel circular" at 9.5. The homepage itself is averaging 9.5.

I have zero clicks so far, but this doesn't worry me yet. Impressions come first; clicks follow as positions improve. I'm watching for the trends and data, and have basically no expectations that it will become more than an interesting side note.

Cloudflare shows 3,000 unique visitors and 28,000 requests over the month. Most of that is bot traffic, and some is me obsessively refreshing. The signal I care about is Search Console, not raw hits.

The pages that are ranking... I can relate to most every one of them. Most surprisingly, I found myself browsing the content and gleaning interesting (perhaps useless) facts.

What I Learned

I was aware of SEO, but I had basically zero practical knowledge.

Lesson one: Google thinks in months, not days. I check Search Console every morning. The dopamine is real, but so is the lesson in patience. Rankings fluctuate. Pages appear and disappear from the index. The signal emerges slowly, and I have to resist the urge to tweak everything before I have real data.

Lesson two: don't blast the sitemap. I submitted all 1,500 URLs on day one. Bad idea. Google interprets this as a flag for generative content 😅 I pulled back, trimmed the sitemap to a handful of pages, and started rolling URLs out gradually as they earn impressions. Let Google discover the site like a human would.

Lesson three: structure matters more than volume. Clustering content into pillars and subcategories isn't just organizational hygiene. It's how one builds topical authority. Google wants to see that I'm an expert in a domain, not a content mill spraying keywords. The URL hierarchy is part of that signal.

Next Hypothesis

The bet I'm most curious about hasn't been tested yet...

AI summaries are reshaping SEO. Recipe sites are dying because Google can extract "preheat to 375, bake for 20 minutes" and serve it directly. There is a distinct possibility that AI summaries will cannibalize the content pages of yore, and the open web becomes a source corpus for models rather than a destination for readers.

My next hypothesis is that AI summaries won't cannibalize content centered on open-ended human experiences. People will still click through when the question is emotional, not informational. IsThisNormal is positioned to test this directly. Time will tell if (a) this is true, and (b) my content guidelines provide readers any real value.

Thanks for reading!

~Adam