Anyone publishing with AI assistance eventually asks the same question: will Google treat this as spam? The honest answer is that the relevant rule is not about the tool at all. It is about what the pages are for. This post reads the policy in plain terms and ends with a check you can run on your own output.
What the policy says
Google introduced the term scaled content abuse in March 2024, alongside policies on expired domain abuse and site reputation abuse. It replaced the older "spammy automatically generated content" language. The definition, as it is widely quoted, is generating many pages for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings and not helping users.
Two things stand out. The test is primary purpose, and the policy names no particular technology. Google’s Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan, has been reported as saying the company does not care whether such content comes from AI, from automation, or from people. A writers’ room producing thin pages in bulk is in the same position as a script doing it.
What it is not
It is not a ban on AI-assisted drafting, and it is not a ceiling on how often you publish. A single well-researched page that happens to have been drafted with a model is not what the policy describes. Volume alone does not make a site spammy, and a low count does not make it safe: a handful of pages made only to catch searches, with nothing useful on them, still fits the definition.
Where the risk actually sits
- Template pages with swapped nouns. The same article repeated across hundreds of locations, products or keywords, with only the name changed.
- Pages with no source of truth. Claims that nobody checked, statistics that cannot be traced, quotes that never happened.
- Pages nobody would send to a customer. If staff would not share the URL with a prospect, it probably exists for the crawler.
- Rewrites of other people’s pages that add nothing the original did not already say.
Reports also say Google has clarified that its existing spam policies, including this one, apply to its AI search features. Sources disagree on which updates enforced the policy and when, so treat any specific date you read as unconfirmed unless it comes from Google.
A five-question check for AI-assisted pages
- Who is it for? Name the reader and the decision the page helps them make. If you cannot, stop.
- What does it add? Identify the one thing a reader gets here that the first page of results does not already give them.
- Was it checked? A person confirmed each factual claim against a source, and the page names the sources.
- Would you stand behind it? Someone with the authority to say no read it, and could say no.
- Is it distinct? Put it beside your two closest pages. If a reader could swap them without noticing, merge or drop one.
A page that passes all five is unlikely to be what the policy was written for, whoever or whatever typed the first draft. A page that fails them is a problem with or without AI.
What to do this week
Pull your twenty newest URLs and run the five questions on each. Consolidate pages that fail the "distinct" test, add sources where the "checked" test fails, and retire anything with no clear reader. Keep a short log of what changed and why, so a later ranking shift can be traced to a decision rather than guessed at. For a related look at what readers and reviewers notice first, see the tells of AI content.
Sources: secondary reporting and summaries of Google Search Central, "Spam policies for Google web search" (scaled content abuse), including coverage at ppc.land and Animalz on the March 2024 update. Google’s own pages could not be reached from the publishing environment, so this post avoids quoting policy wording beyond the widely repeated definition.