Somewhere right now, a website is publishing its fourth blog post of the morning thanks to AI. Nobody read it before it went live, and nobody will read it after it’s published.
That approach just got a lot riskier. Google rolled out a spam update in August, and the sites hit hardest appear to be the ones treating AI like a content vending machine.
I’ve talked before about how brands can humanize their content. And following Google’s recent spam update, that matters more than ever.
What Actually Happened
Google confirmed the August 2026 spam update finished rolling out on August 21. No new spam policy or named technique was announced. Google called it a normal spam update and left it there.
While they didn’t directly call it out, it appears that sites publishing hundreds of low-value pages a day saw serious ranking collapses, while human-authored sites mostly rode it out fine. This comes shortly after Google published research on a system called S-CTS, or Scalable Cluster Termination System, designed to identify networks of mass-generated AI spam. We can't be certain it was deployed in this August update, but it gives us a glimpse of where Google's attention is.
AI Isn't the Issue. It's How You Use AI.
Google has said repeatedly that AI-assisted and AI-generated content can rank perfectly well. What they do have a problem with is generating a large volume of pages primarily to manipulate rankings rather than publishing anything helpful.
It's not about whether AI wrote it. It's about what it was written for.
The Dividing Line Was Effort, Not AI
What fell hardest was what one analysis called "lift and shift": AI output pasted into a page builder as a single wall of text, published, and repeated at volume. Same formatting on every page. Three sentences of substance inflated into 500 words. Subheadings and bullets arranged in that unmistakable pattern you can spot from the search results page without even clicking.
You already know what this looks like, because you've been annoyed by it. You search for something simple, and the first four results are near-identical pages that take 500 words to tell you something that needed 40.
Meanwhile, plenty of AI-assisted pages came through this just fine. Ones with real photos, original charts, comparison tables, and an actual human editing pass. What sets these two content types apart is the level of effort after AI was used.
The Question to Ask Before You Publish Anything
Every time you add a piece of content to your site, ask one question: What am I writing this for?
Whatever your answer is should revolve around the customer. It’s the difference between a content strategy and a content factory.
A few questions worth running every draft through:
- Does this answer real customer questions?
- Questions you've been asked out loud, on the phone, in an email, or on a sales call.
- Is there anything here someone couldn't find somewhere else?
- Your experience, your data, your photos, your take. If it's interchangeable with your competitors' version, it probably reads that way to Google too.
- Did a human actually read this before it went live?
- A simple, but easily overlooked question today. Did someone read, edit, fact-check, and put the content in your brand's voice?
Quality > Quantity
Google has been fighting mass-produced content since long before AI showed up. Exploits like content farms, article spinners, and doorway pages all worked for a while... until they didn't. AI slop is just a new face on a very old problem.
This doesn’t mean that you have to stop AI use entirely. It's a useful tool for forming outlines, cleaning up a rough draft, or getting past a blank page. But it should be a tool in service of a strategy, not a replacement for one.
If your SEO plan was to hand your entire content operation over to your favorite AI platform and walk away, I strongly suggest you reconsider. Content produced without regard for the person reading it will never work long-term.
When it comes to writing content, quality will always beat quantity. Put your users first. Ask what questions they have and what would make their decision easier, then build your content with that in mind.
Take the time to get your content right, and the rankings will follow.
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