Skip to content
PractitionerLily Ray, 2026

Publishing large-scale AI-generated or templated pages with little human review is a recurring pattern among sites penalized by Google in 2026

Content production

Reader Note:
Drawn from the author's own recovery work with sites that were hit, with neither the number of sites nor their identities given. Looking only at penalised sites cannot establish what causes a penalty: sites doing the same things and not penalised are nowhere in view, so this is a description of the clients she saw rather than a test of what Google acts on.
Evidence:
Expert judgment
Vendor interest:
Moderate — This comes from a company with a commercial interest in this market, so it is not a neutral source.
Sample:
Not disclosed

Good for

Getting a rough orientation, and deciding what to check yourself.

Not for

  • Anything that needs a measurement. Nobody counted or tested this.
  • This comes from a company with a commercial interest in this market, so it is not a neutral source.
  • The source never says how big its sample was or what went into it.
  • The source talks about this as cause and effect — that is its reading, not a finding.
  • This result turned up while the researchers were searching the data. It has not been tested a second time.
  • The source never says how this number was measured.

Go deeper on this topic

Our Substack turns the data behind these cards into full breakdowns: what changed, why, and what to do about it.

Fixing your influencer marketing campaign: How to get into the top 10% of advertisers

Coming soon

This feature isn’t available yet.