Google’s scaled content policy, in plain English
The policy that decides whether a set of generated pages is an asset or a liability is short, public, and widely misread. Here is what it actually says.
What the policy says
Google’s spam policies define scaled content abuse as creating many pages whose primary purpose is manipulating search rankings rather than helping users. The examples Google gives include using generative tools to produce pages without value, lightly rewording scraped content, and stitching pages together from fragments that add nothing. Since the March 2024 update, the policy is explicit that the method does not matter: content produced at scale is judged the same way whether a human, a spreadsheet or a model made it.
What the policy does not say
It does not say location pages are spam. It does not set a number of pages that is too many. It does not ban templates, automation or AI assistance. The line is drawn through purpose and value, not through tooling or volume – ten worthless pages are inside the policy’s target and two hundred genuinely useful ones are not.
The three questions that decide it
- Purpose: does each page exist to answer a search someone actually makes, or to occupy a results slot?
- Value: does the page contain something a competing page does not – real local knowledge, original detail, a direct answer?
- Distinctiveness: would a reader who saw two of your pages side by side call them different pages, or the same page in different hats?
What this means for a local business
A service-area estate fails the policy when the pages are substitutable – the swap-the-town test in our doorway pages guide. It passes when each page carries something true about its place. The practical discipline is to measure how similar your pages actually are instead of guessing, and to hold back the ones with nothing local to say until there is something to say.
Google’s own self-assessment
Google’s helpful content guidance suggests asking whether a page offers original information or analysis, whether it says anything beyond the obvious, and whether someone would bookmark or recommend it. It also asks publishers to make clear who wrote the content, how it was produced – including any automation – and why it exists. Those questions are a better pre-publish checklist than any tool’s green tick.
Is AI-assisted content against Google’s rules?
No. The policy targets mass-produced pages whose primary purpose is ranking manipulation, however they are produced. AI assistance on a genuinely useful page is not a violation; a thousand worthless pages typed by hand are.
Will ten location pages get a small business penalised?
Not for being ten pages. The risk is substitutability: if the ten read as one page with the town name swapped, they fit the doorway and scaled-content definitions regardless of the count.
Does publishing many pages at once look like abuse?
Publication speed is not named in the policy; value is. That said, a large batch of thin pages appearing at once is exactly the footprint the policy describes, so the safer pattern is to publish in defensible tranches as the local substance is ready.
Where Townsmith fits
Townsmith generates local pages with the policy’s questions built in as maths: every page is scored against its closest sibling before publishing, the score withholds credit until the page carries local substance, and the scoring is documented so you can defend it to a client or to yourself.