Google says scaled content is now a bigger problem than link spam

Google said at its Search Central Live Deep Dive event in Europe that scaled, low-effort content has become more of a problem than link spam, according to Search Engine Roundtable’s write-up of John Campbell’s recap for the agency We Are Roast. Campbell credited the warning to Google’s Gary Illyes, and reported Google’s explanation for the run of spam updates through 2026: there is far more new content than there used to be, a high percentage of it is spam, and the team is now using AI to help catch more of it. Illyes repeated a figure Google has given before, 40 billion spam pages filtered a day.

Link spam has not left Google’s list of content issues, which still covers cloaking, doorway pages, scraped content and hacked content alongside it. What changed is which item the updates are chasing hardest, and that decides where a diagnosis should start. A site that lost traffic in one of this year’s spam updates and answered with a disavow file and an outreach spreadsheet has been working on the lower of the two priorities Google named.

Google also repeated that core updates judge content at page level rather than domain level, which is why some pages on a site go up while others go down in the same update. A mixed result inside one property is the expected outcome, not evidence that the drop came from somewhere else. The comparison worth making is between the pages that held and the pages that fell, which also fits an earlier report that Google may test a sample of a scaled page set before cutting crawl to the rest.

Campbell’s recap also quoted Google on Discover, where AI slop is increasing and bringing more poor quality content into the feed, and where user feedback is what new spam filters get built from. A filter built from reader reaction arrives after the content it judges, so the safer read is that clearing today’s thresholds says nothing about the next set. Campbell’s own conclusion points the same way: expect more spam updates and new spam thresholds.

The criteria to audit against

The same event produced a usable checklist. Nacho Mascort, an SEO who manages large sites and wrote up the Barcelona sessions against Google’s documentation, set out the criteria, and the SEO consultant Aleyda Solis summarized them for anyone planning a content audit:

• Effort, originality, talent or skill, and accuracy, assessed across the main page types rather than across the site as a whole. Google’s documentation now spells out the effort and originality test for AI-assisted pages.
• Commodity content: what does the page contribute that a reader cannot already find elsewhere?
• The scale question: a template that gives a reader something useful across 100 pages may give far less across 10,000.
• The brand swap: with a competitor’s name on the same content, would it still be as useful, and what makes this version worth choosing?

What to do

• Run the audit on page sets rather than on the site. Pick the sets built from a template or with AI assistance, sample pages that lost rankings and pages that kept them, and score each sampled page on effort, originality, skill and accuracy.
• Ask the scale question of a template before extending it. A layout that earns its place on a few hundred pages can stop earning it at ten thousand, where the page count is the only thing that changed.
• Keep the backlink work for sites with a real history of buying or trading links. For everyone else it is the second question now, not the first.
• Re-audit after each spam update. Filters built from user feedback keep moving, so one clean pass is not a permanent one.