A news site with zero staff reached second place in Google within a month
Zero staff is not zero work: the work moved from writing to reading.
- Answers
- Can a news website run with zero staff, and where does the work go?
- Topics
- AI · data · experiment · programming · web · work
- Full article on willem.com
- https://willem.com/en/2026-03-24_zero-staff/
Summary
In March 2026 hartvaat.nl, a Dutch cardiovascular news site that collects, reads, translates and publishes on its own every night, reached second place in Google, right under the incumbent, and the phone rang. I built two more like it that month.
Full text
Three sites in a week, all on the same rigid structure: a source list, a nightly run that reads and translates, a publisher that puts it online. The structure has to be rigid, because the model will happily fill any gap you leave with something plausible. The numbers taught me to count the real people and not the crawlers, and to keep an eye on the limits: the model collects, translates and summarises well, while judgement, structure and trust stay human. The same month I sold the first thousand euro of agent-written content. Zero staff is possible, I have months of proof. But the work did not disappear, it moved: from writing to reading, from publishing to judging, from daily to weekly.