Google scores pages on effort, and effort is not hours
Cyrus Shepard says Google looks for proof of useful work on the finished page, not the hours behind it.
Google appears to score how much real effort went into a page, and the measure is not how long you spent writing it. Cyrus SEO (@cyrusshepard) points to leaked Google API documents that name two data points tied to effort scoring. One is contentEffort, described as an LLM-based effort estimation for article pages. The other is ugcDiscussionEffortScore, a quality signal for user generated pages like forums and comments.
The distinction matters more than it sounds. Shepard's argument is that Google cannot see your process. It can only see what landed on the page.
What counts as high effort
According to Shepard, high effort pages contain at least some elements that AI or automation cannot easily replicate. He names two: original facts gained through your own experience, and unique perspectives or opinions. A page can take you six hours and still look low effort if everything on it could have been assembled from other pages.
This follows Google's recent update to its Helpful Content documentation, which Shepard says got people talking about effort alongside scaled content and fake author profiles. We covered that change earlier.
Ann Smarty (@seosmarty) published her own piece on content effort, and Shaun Anderson (@hobo_web) shared it, quoting her line that Google is starting a war against low-effort AI-generated content and that content effort is part of Google's official guidelines.
What to do
Pick your three most important money pages, the ones you actually want to rank. Read each one and ask whether anything on it could only have come from you. A price you charge. A mistake a customer made last month. A photo you took. A clear opinion about which option you recommend and why.
If the answer is no on any of those pages, add it. One real detail from your own work is worth more than another five hundred words of general background.
This is not a reason to stop publishing. It is a reason to make sure each piece carries something a competitor cannot copy in ten minutes. Shepard says he has published a template for auditing content effort in a Substack post.
Effort is not how much work you actually put into a page. It’s more about the evidence of useful work that ends up on the final page.
Be the person who already knew
One email a day. Under three minutes. You will hear about a Google change before it shows up in your traffic.