Since early 2024, Google has been rolling out spam update after spam update, and each one quietly wipes low-value pages off the map. Most website owners never see it coming. No email, no warning, no penalty notice in your account. Just a slow climb in the number of "crawled, currently not indexed" pages in Search Console, and traffic that keeps slipping for no reason you can point to.
If that sounds like your site, you are not going mad. I have spent the last two years watching this happen to one site after another, clients and competitors alike and the same SEO work methodology has pulled them back every time. The cause is usually not that complicated once you know what these updates are looking for, and Google has been pointing in the same direction the whole tim
The volume of deindexing since early 2026 has alarmed even experienced SEOs. Between February and June 2026, Google rolled out four broad ranking incidents in 13 weeks, the fastest enforcement cadence it has ever run. Site owners across forums and client accounts reported sudden drops, often without any manual penalty notice to explain them.
The June 2026 spam update, launched on 24 June, targeted scaled and templated content. It followed a quieter but significant policy change in May 2026, when Google said for the first time that trying to game its AI answers counts as spam. One line in a policy document, and a trick a lot of sites had been leaning on stopped working.
None of this is Google declaring war on AI. It's Google trying to clean up its own results after years of the web filling up with thin, churned-out pages. And the pages getting pulled tend to look the same.
Everything Google has done since March 2024 points in one direction. It is not a string of random changes. Once you see the sequence laid out, the mess you are looking at right now starts to make sense.
March 2024 was the one that actually changed the rulebook. In a single update, Google added three new kinds of spam it would go after: content churned out at scale, expired domains bought up and repurposed, and what people call parasite SEO, where someone parks junk content on a trusted site to borrow its authority. More than 1,400 websites got hit with manual penalties and dropped out of Google completely. When researchers dug into those sites, nearly all of them turned out to be pumping out automated content that nobody had bothered to edit.
Google was blunt about what it wanted: 40 per cent less unhelpful content in search results. This number tells how big is the clear-out Google had in mind and to be clear, this was never a ban on writing with AI. What Google drew a line under was content made at scale to chase rankings instead of to actually help and provide value to the person reading it.
Another six updates followed before the end of 2024, including spam updates in June and December and a core update in August. Every one of them fed SpamBrain, the system Google uses to spot spam across billions of pages, a bit more to learn from.
The August 2025 spam update dragged on for 27 days, the longest one yet, and zeroed in on thin content, scaled content, expired domains and parasite SEO. By the end of 2025, Google had rolled out seven updates in a single year, more than ever before. The wait between big updates shrank from roughly six months to around three.
The March 2026 spam update was done in under 20 hours, the fastest Google has ever pulled one off. No new rules came with it. SpamBrain had just got better at catching what was already against the rules.
June 2026 carried on in the same vein, going after content built at scale from templates. By now the pattern is hard to argue with. With these updates, Google is getting better and better at enforcing the same rules it set back in March 2024.
It's important to point pout that Google goes after content built to game rankings, not content made properly with a bit of help from AI. That difference is the whole ball game and it's where most people get the wrong end of the stick.
SpamBrain reads patterns across the web and knows what to look for: content cranked out at scale, dodgy link schemes, cloaking, doorway pages and expired domains. The bar it is holding pages against is the one Google spells out in its guidance on experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust. A site with no real author behind it, no point of view and articles scattered across topics that have nothing to do with each other falls short on every count.
Sites with original, expert content and a normal link profile sailed through every update from 2024 to 2026 largely untouched. Google is not handing out punishments for the sake of it. It is running a quality filter, and the filter keeps getting finer.
The four things worth knowing by name are:
Naming them plainly is more useful than gesturing at bad SEO, because each one has a clear fix.
AI writing tools are everywhere in content marketing now, and in principle there is nothing wrong with that. The trouble starts when someone uses them to spin up hundreds or thousands of pages with no human checking the work, no original data and nobody who actually knows the subject. Sites doing that watched their pages drop out of Google again and again across 2024, 2025 and 2026.
Google is not punishing content for being written with AI, it's punishing weak content. Content made in bulk with nobody steering it tends to be weak from the start, because a machine on its own cannot bring real experience, a sharp insight or genuine expertise to the page.
The way I think about it is simple: supervised or not. A person who uses AI to research, draft and shape a piece, then brings their own judgement and what they actually know to it, ends up with something Google rewards, or at least doesn't punish. Feed the raw machine output straight onto the site with none of that, and you have built exactly the kind of page Google is busy clearing out.
Programmatic SEO just means building a lot of pages automatically, usually by dropping different bits of data into the same template: city names, product types, keyword combinations. There is nothing wrong with it in itself. Done well, it's a legitimate and effective technique. Location pages for a national service business or product pages for a large catalogue are perfectly sound when each one carries genuine, distinct content.
The trouble starts when the pages are basically copies of each other. Hundreds of pages where the only thing that changes is the town name or the keyword, with no real content and no reason for anyone to pick you over the next site, are exactly what Google is now stripping out. Coupon aggregator sites using scraped content lost more than 80 per cent of their indexed pages during the first week of the March 2026 update. Templated location-page networks lost rankings within 24 to 48 hours of the June 2026 rollout.
So programmatic SEO is a way to scale, not a way to cut corners. Scale makes good content go further, and it makes weak content fall apart just as quickly.
Before you fix anything, you need to know what you are dealing with. A drop in traffic can come from a spam update, a core update, a technical fault or simple seasonality, and the fix for each is different. Work through these four checks in order.
Open Google Search Console and go straight to the Manual Actions report. This is the fastest way to get a definitive answer. A notice for pure spam or major spam problems means a human reviewer at Google has acted against your site, and the report will tell you what triggered it. If you see a notice here, your path is clear: fix the named issue and file a reconsideration request.
If the report is clean, do not relax yet. Most deindexing in 2024 to 2026 has been algorithmic, and algorithmic demotions never show up here.
Open the Pages report in Search Console and look at how many pages have stayed indexed over the last 12 months. A sudden, steep drop with no technical change to explain it is the clearest sign that an update has deindexed your pages. The same report sorts your unindexed pages by reason, so check how Google has labelled them. Two labels matter most here: "crawled, currently not indexed" and "discovered, currently not indexed". When either one shows up across a lot of pages at once, Google is making a judgement about quality, not struggling to crawl your site.
One thing to get right before you act. If a page sits under "crawled, currently not indexed", do not just resubmit it and hope it sticks. Google left it out because it judged the page to be low value, so resubmitting the same page changes nothing. Improve the page first, then ask Google to index it again.
Pull your traffic graph and mark the day the drop began. Then compare that date against the confirmed update timeline. If your fall lines up with a known spam update, such as 24 March or 24 June 2026, you have your likely cause. If it lines up with a core update instead, you are dealing with a broader quality reassessment rather than a policy breach, and the response is different. The Google Search Status Dashboard publishes exact rollout dates, so use it rather than guessing.
Once you know what caused the drop, turn to the content itself. A content audit in 2026 goes well beyond keyword rankings. You are looking at structural problems, keyword cannibalisation, thin pages, search intent the page does not actually answer, weak topical relevance, gaps in your topic coverage and whether there are real signs of expertise and a real author behind each page. This is where the actual diagnosis happens.
Sort your pages by traffic and intent, not by how many you have. Recovery is a matter of separating the pages that genuinely earn their place from the pages that only ever existed to rank, then deal with each group on its own terms.
One last warning. Be wary of the "SEO gurus" on X and LinkedIn selling you a flawless system for churning out content at scale. More often than not, the climb is followed by a hard fall, and the fall is Google catching up with them.
Set your expectations before you start. Recovery from a spam update usually takes three to six months after you resolve the underlying issues, because Google has to recrawl and reprocess everything before any improvement appears. For sites that leaned heavily on programmatic SEO, the work means consolidating thin near-duplicate pages, adding genuine content to the survivors and removing or redirecting pages with no indexable value.
You do not have to work out which of those applies to you on your own. I have spent years pulling sites out of exactly this situation, and the first step is always the same: a proper look at what Google is actually seeing on your site.
Do you want to find out why your pages are slipping and what it will take to win them back? Book a free consultation with Origin SEO today.
