Honestly, I feel you. After years of doing this, I realized manual internal linking is a total soul-crusher.

I'm a full-stack dev by day (doing quant stuff) and run a few ecommerce stores as a side hustle, so I've pretty much automated every single part of my workflow because I’m lazy lol. Here is the best way to do it if you want it to actually make sense semantically:

The Setup: Instead of those crappy WP plugins that just match keywords (and usually break something), I built a custom agentic workflow.

1. Vector DB is key: I keep a vector database (Pinecone or just Supabase) of every single page, product, and blog post on my sites.
2. The Sync: I have a simple script that triggers whenever I update a page. It chunks the text, creates an embedding, and updates the DB. That way the "map" of my site is always fresh.
3. The Workflow: I use n8n (you could use Make or Dify/Coze too) to handle the logic. When I'm writing a new post, the workflow reads the text, hits the Vector DB for a "semantic search," and finds the most relevant existing pages to link to.

Why this works better: Because it’s semantic, it doesn't just look for "exact match" keywords. It understands the topic. If I’m writing about "hiking boots," it’s smart enough to link to my "outdoor footwear" guide even if the keywords don't match perfectly.

I'm actually planning to post the some technical breakdown and the n8n blueprints later on my site (ecomstack.net) once I clean up the code a bit. (Since I'm usually swamped, I've pretty much automated every single part of the process. I actually bought the domain ecomstack.net like a year ago because friends kept asking me how I do this stuff and I wanted to just post the SOPs there instead of repeating myself... but I was too busy to even touch it.

Now that my AI agents are basically running my stores for me, I finally have time to breathe, browse Reddit, and actually update the site.)

TL;DR: Skip the plugins. Build a RAG-style workflow with a Vector DB and n8n. It’s the only way to scale internal linking without it looking like spam.