The PENDING + /status polling switch is the right call. I hit the same wall with long AI jobs on serverless and ended up with the same shape.

On the SEO side, one thing I'd add to the DR signal: when I research what to build next, the strongest evidence isn't a weak SERP, it's a small site that's already getting real clicks for the query (I use roughly 100+ clicks and 10%+ of the traffic as my bar). "High-DA thin content" says there's a gap; a small site winning clicks proves the gap can actually be won. Also watch out for keyword difficulty numbers in third-party tools. I've found them stale often enough that I stopped trusting them on their own.

Are you pulling actual traffic per ranking page, or only DR + SERP content?