Gagan Ghotra

Updated on 19th Dec to include some comments (and my additional thoughts) under my LinkedIn post on programmatic SEO & AI.

Earlier today I had a short call with a prospect SEO client, they are a SaaS startup based out of Sydney. And for the last 14 months were using programmatic SEO and AI to create content at scale BUT now with December Core Update rolling out have lost all the rankings 🙄

Even though using AI to create content at scale and ranking for everything in Google’s Search Results might seem lucrative to do! But that’s not the right thing to get sustainable traffic from Google Search for years to come. I think programmatically generating 1000s of pages that too having all AI content (no editing or addition of anything by real Humans) is kind of “do it until it works” thing.

I keep telling business owners that using programmatic SEO & AI to scale will work for some months but eventually that will get demoted in search results leading to loss of all traffic.

I think its not only about creating 1000s of AI content pages using programming techniques but if a small business is using AI to create content for like 200 pages still the situation might end up – loosing all traffic from Google Search.

In general I don’t recommend publishing any AI content at all!!

Also Google in its spam policy for Scaled Content Abuse clearly says “Using generative AI tools or other similar tools to generate many pages without value for users” is spam and a violation of the policy. Which is definitely something that site owners must be aware of before using AI to publish a lot of content.

I suggest to NOT use any at scale – any AI powered process of publishing 1000s of pages.

I posted this on my LinkedIn too to which someone replied

There is a right way and a wrong way to do Programmatic SEO and most SEOs don’t do it correctly, rush it or build the wrong types of pages. Not their fault either as the information available on the topic online does tend to push quantity over quality for the most part

We saw no change in Programmatic SEO content on the sites personally run by myself in the December core update and are still ranking strong.

To which I replied this

yeap I think doing programmatic SEO is fine but combining it with fully AI written pages (no human input) and then doing it at a scale of 1000s of pages that’s when actual quality of Google’s Search results start to deteriorate and then algorithmically they tackle it by a core update!

I think that its ok to use programmatic SEO but at the same time, using it at scale with AI is an issue. If all the pages are generated by AI with nothing added by human then value for Google’s Search users per page is less and that’s why eventually Google demote the whole domain in its search results leading to lose of most of rankings.

Also even Google has said that programmatic SEO is often just a fancy banner for spam to which I agree! If want to do programmtic SEO then it has to be done carefully and strategically to make sure that each page have something unique!

But the best way to get sustainable traffic and continue to get from Google Search for years to come, focus on writing truly helpful content which is useful for people and after reading they walk away with knowing something

That is the only way to win in search results going into 2025 I think 🙂