SEO & GEO
Scaled content abuse
By Rubén García · 3 min
Mass-producing pages, with AI, templates or by hand, to rank on Google without offering anything useful to readers. Google treats it as spam.
What Google penalises isn't the tool but the goal: churning out pages to manipulate its results. According to Google, using AI appropriately isn't against its guidelines.
Hypothetical example: a site creates 500 “best plumber in [city]” pages with the same text, changing only the city name. That's scaled content abuse.
Google introduced this policy in March 2024, building on its old policy on automatically generated content: it no longer matters whether a machine, a person or both make the pages.
If your site breaks it, it can drop in the results or disappear from them. According to Google, recovering after fixing it can take months.
The September 2026 spam update (24 September to 8 October) put the focus back on these policies, although Google didn't say what kind of spam it targeted.
