Generative AI has removed the barrier to publishing at scale. A brand can produce thousands of pages in an afternoon, and even be bold enough to call it programmatic SEO. For many brands, it worked, bringing in massive search traffic and organic revenue.

Management teams also buy in easily, because time to market is short and production costs are low.

Those same two things are now what make it fail. Aggressive programmatic SEO initiatives like these are collapsing or drawing manual penalties, because no one asks whether these pages deserve to exist.

Google has been clear about this. On March 5, 2024, it strengthened its scaled content abuse policy to apply whether automation, humans, or a combination produces the pages, and later reported 45% less low-quality, unoriginal content in results.

On Sept. 7, 2026, John Mueller replied on Bluesky to a site that generated pages from every combination of domain names, technologies, and attributes.…