Google says more spam updates are coming
Staff said the spam team is now using AI to catch more of the flood of cheap pages.
Google told an audience at its Search Live event to expect more spam updates, the ranking changes aimed at sites that break its rules. The comments come from a day 3 recap by John Campbell, shared by SEO consultant Glenn Gabe.
The reason given was volume. According to the recap, Google said there have been more spam updates recently "because there is so much more new content", and that the team is now using AI to help catch more of it. Google also said AI makes content easy to create, and that this is flooding the web with low quality pages.
The line small business owners should read twice is the one about what gets caught. Scaled, low-effort content is named as the risk, and Google said to expect new spam thresholds as well as more updates. That follows the September spam update, which rolled out in waves and appeared to hit templated and mass-produced pages (earlier).
What counts as low effort
Google did not publish a checklist, but a related thread from Shaun Anderson of Hobo Web points at how effort may be measured. He notes Google's 2024 Content Warehouse leak listed an internal attribute called contentEffort, described in the leak as an "LLM-based effort estimation for article pages". He is clear that no SEO knows how much weight Google actually gives it.
His practical test is replication cost. A page you could recreate in minutes by scraping a feed, lightly rewriting what already ranks, or running an unedited prompt scores low. A page built on your own data, original measurements, first-hand reporting or specialist judgment scores high because it is expensive to copy.
Anderson makes one more point worth holding onto. AI assistance by itself is neutral in his read. What matters is how unique the inputs are and how much human editing happens afterwards. Google's own public quality rater guidelines tell evaluators to give the lowest rating when nearly all the main content is auto-generated or AI-generated with no manual oversight, curation or added value.
What to do
If every article on your site answers a real question and was written or edited by a person who knows the subject, nothing here asks you to change course. If you have a folder of near-duplicate pages, a city or service swapped in a template, or bulk posts nobody checked before they went live, that is the pile to deal with first. Open your sitemap, find the pages you could not defend to a customer, and either rewrite them properly or delete them.
Nothing on this page is a confirmed algorithm change. It is Google saying what is coming and why.
Expect more spam updates and new spam thresholds. Scaled, low-effort content is the risk.
AI assistance itself is neutral; the score depends on the uniqueness of the inputs and the human editing applied afterwards