Week 2: I Let an AI Agent Run My HighLevel Affiliate Site. Here Are the Real Numbers.

I'm running Peace Call, a small HighLevel (GoHighLevel) affiliate site, with an AI agent doing most of the daily work. The agent is Grok Bot: an AI assistant that works on its own cloud computer with a shell, a browser and API access, and runs scheduled jobs while I sleep. I mention it by name because it's the tool I actually use. Peace Call has no partnership with the company behind Grok Bot, gets no endorsement from it, and isn't paid to mention it.

This is week 2 of a build-in-public series. Every number below comes from our own morning report (Search Console, YouTube, Bluesky and our click logs), pulled on October 18, 2026 at 08:48 Japan time. Where a number is zero, I say zero.

Short version: the machine is running, and almost nobody has seen it yet.

What are the real numbers after two weeks?

One honest caveat about clicks. Our click log counted 46 affiliate-link clicks in the last 7 days after removing bots and our own tests. But 40 of those had no referrer and no channel label, which looks automated, so I don't count them as people. Only 6 came with a channel label: YouTube 3, PeerTube 2, IndieAgora 1. Those 6 are the closest thing we have to proof that a real person clicked.

The Google numbers are small but real. The best search terms so far are "answering service cost" (13 impressions, average position about 94) and "gohighlevel pricing" (11 impressions, about 64). Position 64 is page seven. Nobody clicks on page seven.

What does the AI agent actually do every day?

About 30 scheduled jobs, all in Japan time. Here is the real list, grouped:

• Morning numbers (08:45). Pulls Search Console, Bing, YouTube, Bluesky and click logs into one report, filters out bots and tests, and writes the result to a CSV.
• Social queues. Bluesky 5 posts a day, Mastodon 4, Tumblr 4, X 1, all through each platform's official API. Twice a day it reads replies and writes helpful answers to real questions.
• Articles. Four new or updated guides a week on the site, then copies to Dev.to, Medium, Substack, WordPress.com and Hashnode with a canonical link back to the original.
• Video. One YouTube video a day from a queue of Shorts and longer walkthroughs, plus the same videos on Dailymotion, Vimeo and two PeerTube servers.
• Japanese channels. Articles in Japanese on note, Hatena Blog, Zenn and a few other Japanese blogs, written natively in Japanese (not machine-translated English).
• Cold email. Up to 20 one-time emails a night to US service businesses whose public website shows a specific missed-call gap. One email per business, never a follow-up, and "stop" is honored the same day.
• Journalist requests. Checks HARO-style requests each weekday and drafts answers when we have real data to offer.
• Maintenance. A weekly check that all 119 channels still load, and a short weekday slot to fix broken profiles.
• Weekly report (Mondays). Real human numbers per channel. Channels with zero human signal for four weeks get cut back.

What can't the AI agent do?

More than you'd think, and this is the useful part.

• Phone or SMS verification. Many platforms ask for a phone number. The agent doesn't have one, and I don't hand mine out to every site. That rules out several channels and some YouTube features (custom thumbnails, chapters, community posts).
• Payments and identity. Payout setup, photo ID checks and anything involving money stay with me. The agent never asks for passwords or card numbers in chat.
• Sign-in with Google, Apple or Facebook. Off-limits on the agent's computer, with one exception (YouTube).
• Publishing YouTube videos publicly through the API. Until the API project passes Google's audit, every upload is locked to private. So 15 finished videos are waiting for me to flip them to public by hand.
• Making people care. It can publish 165 pieces a week. It can't make a stranger stop scrolling. That part is the real job.

What went wrong in the first two weeks?

• A 22% bounce rate on night one of cold email. 2 of the first 9 emails bounced. The rule was "pause above 5%," so the agent paused, built an address checker (MX records, the address actually listed on the site, role and disposable flags), and only resumed after I said yes. Since then: 74 sent, 7 bounced.
• Accounts that didn't survive. A Ko-fi page was unpublished for looking like SEO spam. A podcast host froze the account. One Lemmy server denied the signup. One video site shows zero videos even though uploads went through. All of it is logged, none of it was argued with.
• Posting into an empty room. The social queues worked perfectly and reached almost nobody. Week 2's fix: fewer broadcast posts, more replies to real questions, pinned posts, playlists, and a page that links every channel (getpeacecall.com/elsewhere).
• Reading the data wrong. The agent once reported "0 tags" on our PeerTube videos. The list endpoint just doesn't return tags. We now double-check numbers against a second source before acting on them.

What rules keep it from turning into spam?

These are written down and the agent follows them every run:

1. Disclose AI use and the HighLevel affiliate link on every post, page and video.
2. No automated likes, follows, DMs or reposts. Replies are written one at a time, for a real question.
3. No income claims. No "business in a box." No invented trial lengths or bonuses (HighLevel's affiliate policy forbids unapproved incentives).
4. Use HighLevel's referral link as is: no masking, no redirect tricks, and never use it to sign up ourselves.
5. Reddit and forums: answers only, links only where the community rules allow them, and a human approves before anything posts.
6. Only report numbers from real people. Bots and our own test clicks are filtered out before any report.

What does it cost? (real)

Exchange rate used: 1 USD = 158 JPY (ECB reference rate via Frankfurter, Oct 16, 2026). USD amounts are approximate. Anything we don't have a record for says "not recorded yet" instead of a guess.

Known total so far: about 16,100 JPY a month (about $102), plus the domain and Workspace once their prices are recorded. Revenue so far: $0.

Can I copy the setup?

Yes. Three prompts you can paste into whatever AI agent you use:

1. Morning numbers

Every morning at 8:45, collect yesterday's Search Console impressions and clicks, YouTube views, social followers and affiliate-link clicks. Remove bots and my own test clicks. Write one line per source to metrics.csv and tell me only what changed. Never estimate a number you couldn't fetch; write "not available" instead.

2. One reply, not ten

Search Bluesky for posts from small-business owners asking about missed calls or answering services. Pick at most 5 where you can actually help. Write a short, specific answer with no link. Don't like, follow or repost anything. Show me the replies before posting for the first week.

3. Cold email guardrails

Before sending any cold email: check the domain has MX records, the address appears on the company's own site, it isn't on my opt-out list, and it isn't in the sent log. Send at most 20 a day, 60–90 seconds apart, one email per business, no follow-ups. Pause the whole channel if bounces go over 5% and tell me.

More prompts, the full routine list and the video pipeline are on the Grok Bot know-how hub. The week 1 setup post is here.

What changes in week 3?

• Fix search first: rewrite the titles and intros of the pages Google already shows (the answering-service cost estimator got 46 of the 124 impressions).
• Get the 15 private YouTube videos public, one a day.
• Spend more agent time on answering real questions (Quora, Reddit where allowed, Bluesky) and less on broadcasting.
• Publish this series weekly, in English and in Japanese, with the same rule: real numbers, even when they're zero.

FAQ

Is this an income claim? No. Peace Call has made $0 so far and has 0 HighLevel signups through its link. Results from affiliate marketing vary and depend on your own effort, audience and time.

Is Peace Call partnered with Grok Bot or HighLevel? No partnership with the company behind Grok Bot. With HighLevel, Peace Call is only an independent affiliate: if you buy through our link, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.

Who writes the content? The AI agent drafts it from sources, and every piece follows a checklist (sources with dates, disclosure, no invented numbers) before it's published. A person sets the rules and makes every decision about money and identity.

Why publish zeros? Because most "I automated my business with AI" posts only show the wins. Zeros are the real starting point, and they show what actually needs work.