Since the smart robots (AI) are helping everyone make websites in 2025, Google had to change the rules. To make sure your blog wins the “SEO War,” you must prove that your posts are better, more truthful, and more helpful than anything a lazy robot could make!
Rule 1: Scaled content abuse
Scaled content abuse is when a website owner tries to cheat the system by making a huge amount of web pages very quickly, usually by using simple automated tools like generative AI, or by copying and pasting information from other places.
Imagine painting a thousand tiny, identical pictures just to fill up a giant museum quickly; Google views this as a low-quality attempt to primarily benefit the owner (maybe to make money from ads) instead of actually helping the people who visit the site. This is a spam practice and is often the main sign of a spammy website.
The key problem is not how the content is made, but that it has little or no value for the visitors. These websites might create hundreds or thousands of pages that just repeat the same basic information, or they might gather content from other feeds or search results and make small changes, like translating it or swapping a few words, without adding any real human effort or originality.
Examples of this low-value content include pages that simply stitch together pieces from different websites or pages where the words make no sense to a person but are stuffed with search keywords.
Rule 2: Human first content
Google’s updates, such as the October 2025 algorithm update, encourage creators to focus on “human-first SEO” where information quality outweighs technical tricks.
This means that content providing real insights, verified data, and original value is rewarded more than ever. The ultimate goal is to surface “content written by people, for people,” which is supported by useful data and genuine experience.
AI systems reward content that shows a high degree of human effort and originality, and penalize automatically generated low-value content (often associated with AI misuse).
Rule 3: Authorship
Authorship, within the context of search quality evaluation, refers to the content creator—the individual(s) or entity responsible for creating the Main Content (MC) on a webpage. It is crucial for a website to clearly identify who is responsible for the site and who created the content being evaluated.
AI systems (and the ranking systems they inform) favor content where the author demonstrates high E-E-A-T. This is evidenced by author bios that explain credentials and real-world experience. For example, a content creator with a wealth of experience may be considered to have a very high level of E-E-A-T for relevant topics. Content created by established journalists, scientists, or researchers is judged based on the credentials listed as authors. Such authors who publish long-form guides, original research, and case studies, and cite reliable sources, contribute to strengthening E-E-A-T signals.
A lack of clear authorship, especially for high-stakes topics known as Your Money or Your Life (YMYL), makes content untrustworthy and may lead to a Lowest Quality rating. Furthermore, AI systems specifically target deceptive information about content creators:
- Creating “fake” owner or content creator profiles.
- Using AI to generate content accompanied by made-up “author” profiles (e.g., AI-generated images or deceptive descriptions) to falsely present the content as human-written is a form of deception warranting the Lowest quality rating.
- Inaccurate and deceptive claims about a creator’s expertise (e.g., falsely claiming to be a medical professional) are also considered deceptive.
Rule 4: Unoriginal content
Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems, particularly those governing search quality and spam detection, handle unoriginal content by categorizing it as low-value and subjecting it to demotion or the “Lowest Quality” ranking, based primarily on the lack of effort, originality, and added value for users.
Content will receive the Lowest quality rating if all or almost all of the Main Content (MC)—including text, images, audio, or videos—is copied, paraphrased, embedded, auto or AI generated, or reposted from other sources with little to no effort, little to no originality, and little to no added value for website visitors.
AI systems, such as SpamBrain, are continuously trained to detect spam techniques. This includes a crackdown on spun or templated content and AI generated content farms that publish huge volumes of thin articles or product pages that offer little benefit to readers.
Having duplicate content (the same content under different URLs) on a site is not a violation of spam policies, but it can waste crawling resources. In these cases, search engines will choose a single URL, the canonical URL, to show to users. This is considered inefficient but does not trigger a manual action.
Rule 5: Short time to value
Short time to value (TTV) is a concept used in SEO that refers to the time it takes for a user to gain value from a piece of content. The goal is for a content piece’s time to value to be short, allowing users to get the information they are looking for as quickly as possible.
Many websites currently exhibit poor time to value due to elements such as hero images, author bios, and long-winded introductions that delay access to the main content. This poor user experience is often worsened on mobile devices because of the extensive scrolling required.
Poor TTV can negatively impact several user experience metrics that may affect traffic and rankings, including:
- Bounce rate: The percentage of website visits with no engagement before the user leaves.
- Dwell time: The average time a user spends on a page before returning to the search results.
- Average session duration: How long a typical session lasts.
To improve the time to value, the most important information and elements should be placed at the top of the page, ideally above the fold. This strategy often involves using the “bottom line up front (BLUF)” or “inverted pyramid” approach, meaning the information users are seeking is immediately accessible.
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