What is Scaled content abuse?

What changed in 2024

The earlier policy language focused on "automatically generated content", which let people argue that human review made mass production acceptable. The current wording removes that argument: the question is the purpose and the value of the pages, not how they were produced.

What it does not prohibit

• Programmatic pages where each one is genuinely useful and distinct
• Publishing a lot of content over time, at a quality bar
• Using AI as a tool inside a process with real editorial judgement
• Templated pages backed by real data that a reader actually wants

The practical test before publishing at volume

For each generated page, name the specific thing on it that is true of that page and false of its siblings. If you cannot, the page is a variant rather than a page, and publishing several hundred of them is the pattern the policy describes.

A useful gate: require evidence before emission. If a page cannot be built without something real behind it, the thin ones never get created.

Where this is covered in depth

A definition can only go so far. The 35 types of SEO, explained without the padding covers this properly — 6 minutes, free, no email required.

Who wrote this

Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan. These definitions come from client work rather than from a content brief — where an entry describes a mistake, it is usually one found on a real site. More about how I work.