Google says bulk pages are judged on quality, not method
Notes from a Google talk say template pages and AI writing are fine, thin output is not.
Google's Gary (@methode) told the Shenzhen SEO conference that building pages in bulk from a template or a data feed is not itself the problem. Lily Ray, who posted notes from the talk, quoted him saying the issue is what those pages actually contain. Gagan Ghotra picked up the same line.
The same goes for AI writing. Per Lily Ray's notes, Gary said the cost of publishing used to be the thing holding the web together, paying humans to make pages with real effort generally led to better pages. Programmatic pages dropped that cost, and language models dropped it to roughly nothing. His point was not that using a model is bad. It is that the quality of the page is what gets judged.
This lines up with the earlier warning that Google can lose trust in a whole site when it finds a pile of bulk-made pages with nothing in them.
Put your content in the HTML
The notes also say Gary still wants important content inside the page's HTML, the raw code Google downloads, rather than only being drawn in afterwards by JavaScript in the browser. His reason was partly that other systems now read pages too, including AI models. The SEO Guy made the same point about sites built with AI website tools, saying make sure it renders server side.
Not everyone read the talk as pure reassurance. Ryan Jones said the comments were as close as Google will get to saying the click behaviour on low-effort AI pages is bad without saying it out loud.
What to do
If you have a set of pages built from one template, open three of them side by side and read them. If the only difference is a swapped city name, a swapped product name or a swapped number, they are the pages Gary is describing. Either give each one something a customer actually needs, or delete it.
If your site was built with an AI website builder, ask whoever built it whether pages render server side. Or open one of your pages, view the page source, and search for a sentence you can see on the screen. If it is not in the source, it is worth fixing.
The problem is never the programmatic setup, it鈥檚 what the programmatic setup is generating.
The problem is not that they use LLMs, it鈥檚 the quality of the pages