Knowledge base v2.13.0 · Community edition · data through 2 October 2026
Thing · Concept
The spam policy against producing many pages mainly to manipulate rankings, whether by AI, people or both.
Glossary · Scaled content abuse
A Google spam policy against generating many pages mainly to manipulate rankings with little value to users, however they are made, including automated translation of scraped content.
Documented in
Google's guide says creating separate content for every variation of how people might search, including fan-out queries, primarily to manipulate rankings or AI responses violates its scaled content abuse policy. It adds that its AI systems can understand a page's relevance even without an exact match to the query.
Google Search Central · Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?
Google's spam policies define scaled content abuse as generating many pages mainly to manipulate rankings, with little or no value to users, no matter how they are created, and list automated translating of scraped content among the examples.
Google Search Central · Day 2 · Focusing on Internationalisation and Localisation
Slide and stage claims that name it, the ones Google’s documentation does not cover first.
Reviewing the spam slide, the speaker said link spam would probably be replaced with scaled content abuse as the spam type worth talking about today.
Scaled content abuse is becoming a problem again: in the early 2000s pages were churned out with Perl or PHP scripts, and now the same is done with LLMs.
Gary Illyes · Day 3 · Wrapping all up: AI, Search, and making sense of everything.
The cheaper tokens become, the more AI slop is created, and Google counts AI slop as scaled content abuse.
Gary Illyes · Day 3 · Wrapping all up: AI, Search, and making sense of everything.
Google's quality talk listed recent updates to Google's spam policies: back button hijacking, scaled content abuse and manipulating AI responses.
The answer is not a claim that Google detects AI text. It says ranking favours text that reads as natural to people. The risk with AI content is scale without value, which falls under Google's scaled content abuse policy, not the tool itself.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?
Treat machine translation as a first draft: have a native speaker review it and adapt dates, calendars and units before publishing, because unreviewed bulk translation that adds little value can also fall under Google's scaled content abuse policy.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 2 · Focusing on Internationalisation and Localisation
The lower selection bar in under-served languages is an opening for content written for that market, not for machine translation at scale: index selection also applies spam signals, and Google's spam policies count generating many pages from scraped content through automated transformations such as translating, with little value for users, as scaled content abuse.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 2 · Deciding what goes in the index?
Weight spam audits toward scaled content abuse: a Googler said that type would replace link spam on the slide, so review mass-produced pages, including AI-generated ones, before older link-building patterns.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 3 · What are quality updates
Kit items about Scaled content abuse: their own words name it, or several of the claims they rest on do.
Do not generate large sets of low-value pages from templates, feeds or LLM output
Rests on 7 claims, 5 of them naming Scaled content abuse; its own words name Scaled content abuse
Publish machine-translated language versions only after human review and localisation
Rests on 5 claims, 3 of them naming Scaled content abuse; its own words name Scaled content abuse
Structure content for readers instead of splitting it into small chunks for AI
Rests on 9 claims, 1 of them naming Scaled content abuse; its own words name Scaled content abuse
Also inglossary terms Scaled content abuse, AI slop
Things named in the same claim, with the number of claims they share.