Google spam updates: AI now hunts AI spam - and scaled pages are the target

Search Engine Roundtable reported it on October 5, 2026. Barry Schwartz, its executive editor, summarised John Campbell's recap of what Google said at Search Central Live Deep Dive Europe, which Google's events page lists as running September 30 to October 2, 2026, in Barcelona. The short version is that Google is releasing more spam updates because the web is filling with more content than ever, and it is now using AI to catch the junk. If your website is how new customers find you, the line between acceptable and spam is tightening around exactly the kind of shortcut AI makes tempting.

Google says AI is now part of how it catches spam

John Campbell is Head of Innovation and AI at ROAST and was one of the community speakers Google named for the event in a Search Central blog post signed by Cherry Prommawin and Gary Illyes of Google's Search Relations team. That same post said the Barcelona agenda would add brand new, mostly AI focused topics. Campbell's recap, as quoted by Search Engine Roundtable, captured Google's explanation for why 2026 has brought so many spam updates.

According to the quotes Schwartz published, Google said "a high percentage of content is spam, and that is what the spam updates target," and "there have been more spam updates recently because there is so much more new content." The line that matters most for business owners is this one: "The team is now using AI to help catch more of it."

Campbell also noted that "AI slop is increasing, which means more poor quality content in the [Discover] feed," referring to Google's Discover feed. Put simply, Google is describing a contest between machine-made content and a machine-assisted filter, and it is telling the industry which side it is investing in.

Scaled, low-effort pages are now a bigger worry than bad links

For years, the spam that made headlines in search was mostly about links: buying them, trading them, faking them. Campbell's recap, as quoted by Search Engine Roundtable, lists the familiar categories Google's spam work targets, including cloaking, doorway pages, scraped content, link spam and hacked content. Then comes the shift. "Gary's warning was that scaled content is now becoming more of a problem than link spam," Campbell wrote, referring to Gary Illyes of Google.

Campbell's own summary was blunt: "Expect more spam updates. Google is dealing with a growing flood of AI slop. Expect more spam updates and new spam thresholds. Scaled, low-effort content is the risk." That is Campbell's reading of the session, not a Google press release, but it comes from someone Google invited to speak at the event.

Illyes also closed the morning with a figure, per the recap: Google filters out 40 billion spam pages a day. Schwartz flagged that this number is not new and had been reported long before, so treat it as context about scale rather than news.

Google judges your site page by page, not as one block

The recap also lists three reasons Google keeps changing how it judges quality. Content formats have expanded beyond ten blue links, and each format needs its own way of judging quality. The breadth of content has grown, with many more pages and sites than before. And spam itself keeps evolving.

According to Campbell's recap, core updates target content at page level, not domain level, which is why some pages on a site go up while others go down. For a business owner, that means one weak section of your site can lose ground even if the rest of it is solid. A clinic's well-written service pages can hold steady while a batch of thin blog posts beside them slides.

Quality also shapes how often Google bothers to visit. In the October 1 episode of Google's Search Off the Record podcast with Martin Splitt, John Mueller said "the crawl demand is very often based on the perceived quality of a website," adding that "it's not purely a technical thing," according to Search Engine Journal. If Google does not think your pages are worth much, it is slower to come back for new ones.

Timing matters too. Search Engine Journal reported timing ranges from a separate Illyes session, again via Campbell's recap of the October 2 session. The typical time to recover from a core update was listed as three to six months, with the slowest case running six months to a year, labelled "next core update." The same tables list "never (quality)" as the slowest outcome for sitemap processing and for end-to-end indexing.

What a clinic, store or trades website should check now

You do not need to become an SEO expert to act on this. A practical checklist circulated alongside the news. Aleyda Solis shared on X a breakdown by Nacho Mascort of Google's approach to quality, based on the Barcelona presentations, Google's documentation and Mascort's experience managing large sites. Her takeaways for a content audit: assess effort, originality, talent or skill, and accuracy across your main page types; identify "commodity content" by asking what your page adds that people cannot already find elsewhere; and check what happens when you scale, because "a useful template for 100 pages might offer much less value across 10,000."

Solis offered one test any owner can run in five minutes: "If you replaced your brand with a competitor's, would the content still be just as useful?" If your plumbing company's page about water heaters would read exactly the same with a rival's name on it, it is commodity content by that definition.

The pattern to look hardest at is the one AI tools make easy: dozens of near-identical pages generated from one template, such as a page for every town you serve where only the town name changes. That is our reading, not a Google statement, but it fits squarely within what Campbell called the risk, scaled, low-effort content. Mascort also said he built a free skill for Claude and Codex that audits a site against these criteria, though we have not tested it.

The technical side is often less of a concern for small sites than people fear. Google's Sitemaps help page says sites on hosting services such as Squarespace or Wix probably have their sitemap managed for them, and that a small site of about 500 pages or fewer, where every page can be reached from the homepage, probably does not need one. For most small businesses the lever is what is on the pages, not the plumbing behind them.

What Google has not said about its AI spam detection

Campbell's recap included one more line worth noticing: "User feedback is really important here. It is what new spam filters are built from." Think of it like the spam folder in your email. The filter learns from what people mark as junk, so what searchers flag shapes what the next filter catches.

The other side: everything here comes secondhand. Google has not published its own announcement about using AI for spam detection; the details come from an attendee's recap, quoted by Search Engine Roundtable. Google has not said which AI systems it uses, how they work, or where the "new spam thresholds" Campbell expects will sit. Nothing in the sources says Google penalises content simply for being written with AI; the warning is about scale and low effort. The timing tables Search Engine Journal reported give no sample size, time period or definition of "typical," and Search Engine Journal said the slides did not appear on Google's Search Central events page as of its publication. Until Google documents any of this, treat it as a strong signal of direction, not a rulebook.

Bottom line

Google is telling the industry, through its own staff on stage, that it is spending more effort on spam, that AI is helping it do so, and that scaled content is becoming more of a problem than link spam. For a business, the safe path is the one that was always sensible: fewer pages, each one specific to your business, written so it would not make sense with a competitor's name on it.

If you opened your own website today and swapped your name for a competitor's, how many of your pages would still read exactly the same?