non-commodity content

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #235 - Google Doesn't Penalize AI Content. It Penalizes Commodity. Scale Decides Which One You Made.

Aug 24, 2026

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10 min read

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #235 - Google Doesn't Penalize AI Content. It Penalizes Commodity. Scale Decides Which One You Made.

The panic that started with Claude's text watermark turned into "write with AI and you're finished." Google's own documentation says the opposite in its very first sentence: generative AI is useful for researching a topic and for adding structure to original content. What gets penalized isn't the tool, it's producing many pages without adding value. A viewer on my YouTube channel asked a sharper question than the industry has been asking, so this week I answer it on two axes: do you have original data, and at what scale are you publishing it? Lily Ray's 220-site study shows what scale does. Then I add my own: an AI engine wrote out its own reasoning for shortlisting us, and it never once asked who wrote the content.Part of a series: GEO Roadmap > Content Quality and Citability. Over the last few weeks we covered how the model decides who to recommend. This week we go back to the start of the chain: how should we produce that content, and where is the line?

Mert Erkal

non-commodity content

May 18, 2026

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12 min read

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #221: After Helpful Content: The Non-Commodity Content Era, Google Says "AI Search Is Still SEO," Microsoft Clarity Citations Goes GA

Three big stories this week. First, Danny Sullivan's commodity vs. non-commodity content distinction has become the new content rule of 2026; HubSpot built a free grader for it on Perplexity. Second, Google's new guide says "AI search is still SEO," but that only holds for Google. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and the Gemini App still respond to different practices. Third, Microsoft Clarity's AI Citations dashboard went GA, free for everyone. Next week brings Google I/O 2026 and Google Marketing Live 2026 back to back.

Mert Erkal

non-commodity content

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #235 - Google Doesn't Penalize AI Content. It Penalizes Commodity. Scale Decides Which One You Made.

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #221: After Helpful Content: The Non-Commodity Content Era, Google Says "AI Search Is Still SEO," Microsoft Clarity Citations Goes GA

The SEOs Diners Club

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