SCALEOScaled content abuse and programmatic SEO: what Google actually says
Programmatic SEO is not against Google's rules. Google's scaled content abuse policy targets many pages made mainly to manipulate rankings instead of helping people, however they were produced: by hand, by templates or by AI. The question Google asks is whether the pages are useful, not how many there are or how they were made.
By the Scaleo team at Reinvent Digital · Updated 16 October 2026
What does Google's scaled content abuse policy cover?
Google added scaled content abuse to its spam policies in March 2024. It describes generating many pages primarily to manipulate search rankings rather than to help users. The examples Google gives include using generative AI to produce many pages without adding value, scraping and lightly rewriting other content, and stitching together content from different pages without adding anything of your own.
What does the policy not say?
- It does not set a page-count limit. There is no safe or unsafe number of pages.
- It does not ban AI. Google judges the result, not the tool.
- It does not ban templates. Consistent layouts are normal and helpful.
Read the policy itself rather than summaries of it. Many articles add thresholds and enforcement figures that Google has not published.
Which programmatic patterns are safe and which are risky?
| Lower risk | Higher risk |
|---|---|
| Services you offer, in places you serve | Pages for places you do not serve |
| Local research on every page | The same text with the city swapped |
| Published in phases, indexing watched | Thousands of pages published at once |
| Each page checked before it goes live | Content nobody reviewed |
| Linked within a clear hierarchy | Reachable only from a sitemap |
Lower risk: pages for services you actually offer in places you actually serve, each with local research, real business facts, internal links within a clear hierarchy, and a quality check before publishing.
Higher risk: thousands of pages generated at once from a keyword list, the same text with the city swapped, pages for places you do not serve, and content nobody reviewed.
What this means for local businesses
A dental chain, hospital group or home-services brand has a real reason to publish one page per service per city: people search that way. The risk is not the number of pages. It is pages with nothing to say. Research per city and a page-level quality bar are what keep a set of local pages on the right side of the policy.
Pre-publish checklist
- Do we really offer this service in this place?
- Does the page contain facts specific to this place?
- Would the page still be useful if search engines did not exist?
- Is it clearly different from every other page in the set?
- Has a person or a second model checked it before it went live?
- Is it linked from a logical place in the site, not only a sitemap?
Publish in stages and watch indexing
Start with a small batch, check in Search Console that the pages are indexed and earning impressions, then expand. A large share of pages left “Crawled, currently not indexed” is Google telling you the set is not adding enough value.
If you receive a manual action
Search Console reports manual actions under Security and Manual Actions. Remove or substantially improve the affected pages, document what changed, and file a reconsideration request from the same report.
Keep reading
- What is programmatic SEO? The complete guide for local businesses
- Doorway pages vs location pages
- How many location pages should you have?
- Local SEO for dentists in India
- Multi-location SEO in India
Want this done for you? See how Scaleo researches, writes and scores every page, or request access.
Questions about scaled content abuse
Is programmatic SEO against Google's guidelines?
No. The policy targets pages made mainly to manipulate rankings with little value for people. Useful, accurate pages built at scale are not the target.
Does Google penalise AI-generated content?
Google's policies judge whether content is helpful, not whether AI produced it. Using AI to mass-produce pages without adding value is the behaviour the scaled content abuse policy describes.
How many pages are too many?
Google has not published a number. The useful question is whether each page has something specific and true to say.
Build location pages that pass this test.
Scaleo researches every city, scores every page and holds back the ones that would read the same anywhere else. You can start on the Free plan.