Quality7 min readFinal draft,
Thin AI content and adult SEO: how to spot it, and what to do with it
Some adult sites filled up quickly with AI-written pages: one per product variant, one per keyword, one per town. Google does not object to AI as such, but it does act against pages made at scale with little value. This note shows how to find the thin pages on your own site and decide, page by page, what to do with them.
§1What Google actually says
In February 2023 Google set out its position on AI-generated content: its ranking systems aim to reward original, high-quality content however it is produced, not all use of automation is spam, and its spam-fighting continues whatever produces the spam. The 2024 scaled content abuse policy adds the other half: many pages made mainly to manipulate rankings, with little value, are spam whether a person or a tool wrote them. The question is never "was AI used?" but "does this page help anyone?"
§2Signs a page is thin
- It could sit on any competitor's site with the brand name swapped.
- The opening paragraph restates the title without answering it.
- It shares its structure, word for word, with dozens of other pages on the site.
- It contains no first-hand detail: no measurements, no photos taken in-house, no customer questions.
- It makes claims with no source, or gets an easily checked fact wrong.
§3Audit your own pages
- List every indexable page with its search visits and links over the past year.
- Group near-identical pages: product variants, town pages, keyword spin-offs.
- Read a sample from each group against the signs above.
- Mark each page: keep, improve, merge, or remove.
§4Decide page by page
| Situation | Action |
|---|---|
| Thin, but gets visits | Rewrite with real detail and keep the address |
| Several thin pages on one topic | Merge into one strong page, redirect the others to it |
| Thin, no visits, no links | Remove, or keep out of the index if customers still need it |
| Useful and accurate | Keep, and add a named author and date |
§5Using AI without writing thin pages
Tools can help with research, outlines and first drafts. What they cannot supply is the first-hand knowledge that makes an adult page trustworthy: how a product actually feels to handle, what customers really ask, what the brand stands behind. A person with that knowledge should write or heavily edit every page, check every claim, and put their name to it. That is how we work on SEO content, and our content brief template shows where the first-hand detail goes.
§6What changed in 2025
Google's quality rater guidelines were updated in January 2025 with a definition of generative AI, and raters were told to give the lowest rating to pages whose main content is almost entirely automated or copied with little added value. The same guidelines say that using AI tools does not on its own decide a page's rating. A further update in September 2025 added AI Overview examples and widened the guidance on topics where accuracy matters most. During 2025, site owners also reported manual actions for scaled content abuse in Search Console.
§7Why adult sites are exposed
Adult brands are tempted by bulk content for understandable reasons: advertising is restricted, so organic search matters more, and writers who know the subject can be hard to find. The result on many sites is hundreds of near-identical pages: "best vibrator for" every audience, city pages that change only the place name, product descriptions spun from the supplier. These pages rarely rank for long, and they make it harder for the good pages on the same site to be found.
§8Signs Google has noticed
- A drop in impressions across many similar pages at once, often after a core update.
- Pages moving to "Crawled, currently not indexed" in Search Console in large numbers.
- A manual action notice for scaled content abuse or thin content.
- New pages taking far longer to be indexed than they used to.
None of these alone proves a quality problem, but together they are worth investigating before publishing more.
§9Recovering after a manual action
If Search Console shows a manual action, read the notice carefully: it says which policy and often which part of the site. Remove or substantially improve the affected pages rather than tweaking them, document what you changed, and then submit a reconsideration request that explains the cause and the fix plainly. Requests that promise future good behavior without showing changes are usually rejected. Recovery can take weeks or months after approval, as the site is reassessed.
§10Rewriting a thin page
- Find the question the page was meant to answer, and check whether another page already answers it better.
- If it stays, gather real facts: your specifications, your staff's knowledge, named sources.
- Rewrite the opening to answer the question in two sentences.
- Add the detail a reader would need to act, and remove filler.
- Link it to the pages a reader would want next, and note the review date.
§11A policy for AI on your team
Write down what AI tools may and may not be used for: research summaries and outlines, perhaps; published text and product facts, no. Require a named editor for every page, a check of every fact against a source, and a note in the brief when a tool was used. A short policy protects the brand, keeps freelancers to the same standard, and answers the question clients and partners increasingly ask. Our approach is described on content marketing.
§12What good looks like after a clean-up
Sites that remove or rewrite their thin pages usually end up smaller and better ranked. Expect the total number of indexed pages to fall, impressions on the remaining pages to recover over a few months, and new pages to be indexed faster. Report those changes honestly to anyone who reads the numbers, so a smaller site is not mistaken for a shrinking business. Our guide to search intent helps decide which questions deserve a page in the first place.
§13Questions to ask an agency or writer
- Who writes each page, and who checks the facts?
- Which tools do you use, and for which tasks?
- Where do product and health facts come from?
- How many pages a month do you propose, and why that number?
- What would make you advise against publishing a page?
A supplier who cannot answer these plainly is likely to produce the kind of pages this note warns about. Bulk page counts quoted before anyone has looked at your site are a warning sign in themselves. Good suppliers usually propose fewer pages than you expect, and explain why each one should exist.
§14Thin pages that are not AI at all
Thin content predates AI tools. Old blog posts written to a keyword target, location pages that change only the town name, and supplier descriptions copied across hundreds of shops all fail the same test: they add nothing a reader could not find elsewhere. The audit and decisions in this note apply to them just as much, whoever or whatever wrote them.
§15Background sources
Source organizations for this guide. Check their sites for the newest version.
QQuestions
Does Google penalize AI-written content?
Not for being AI-written. Google has said it rewards high-quality content however it is produced, and that not all automation is spam. Pages made at scale mainly to manipulate rankings are the problem.
Should we label AI-assisted content?
Where readers would reasonably expect to know, yes. Google suggests explaining who created content and how, including any use of automation.
Is deleting pages risky?
It can be if they have links or visits. Check both first; merge useful pages into a stronger one and redirect, and remove only pages with neither.