Jesse Cunningham Discusses Google’s Treatment of AI Websites

0:00The biggest threat right now is Google banning your website because you're using AI. Google's not banning AI, it's banning slop at scale, but it's cracking down on AI content. So, here's how it works. Here's how to survive it, and this is not a threat, it is happening right now. So, we've had three different spam updates in 2026, and if you get hit, you lose 50 to 80% of your traffic, and some websites get fully de-indexed.

0:22I've had a website that got fully de-indexed, like gone from Google, never to be put in Google again. It's crazy, and they did that manually. So, what we're concerned about is this right here, scaled content abuse. So, Google has very strict terms on their spam policies for Google web search, cloaking, doorway abuse, expired domain abuse, hacked content, hidden text and link abuse. I mean, going on and on, keyword link spam. You know, a lot of this stuff they say, you know, we don't like it, but a lot of this stuff they cannot detect. But, the problem is with AI content, it's very easy to detect.

0:56Now, here's what I believe to be the four signals of scaled slop, and I hate using the word AI slop, but let's just use it in this video. The four signals of scaled slop, content sameness, behavior signals, site patterns, and no experience. So, with content sameness, you have a high semantic similarity across the different pages. So, when we do microsites, there's a reason why each of our service location pages are different. It's not just templated content, right? Behavior signals, this is huge. People land, they bounce, and jump back to Google. That's a bad, bad sign. So, if you build a website,

1:27Google's going to test it, and you're going to see volatility in your rankings. You want people to stay on your website and show that they are associated. And then, site patterns, hundreds of pages published overnight, no real author, generic about us page, all these type of things, and then no experience. If you're going to build a big website or a biggish website, and that's a relative term, I recommend that build it, stage it, and then launch it, right? Don't show Google that you are doing thousands of pages. I mean, I don't even have websites with thousands, a few of them. But, the point is if

1:57you're going to build out a website, you can stage it all and then present it to Google in a finished form. But, we're getting ahead of ourselves. So, two levers, there's going to be a quiet fade for some websites and a hard band for others. So, most people are faced off with this algorithmic demotion. So, the spam system is going to bury the whole site with no warning and no notice.

2:16Right, one day your traffic is down 50 to 80% and we've all seen those charts. And then other people will face a manual action. This is more rare. This is where an actual human reviews and flags the website. People forget that Google has an army of people that review websites and they can go out and just touch your website and manually de-index it. Not fun. All right, so who's getting wiped out? The sites that are getting decimated, 60 to 80% are niche info sites with hundreds of AI pages. This This is reminiscent of the HCU update.

2:44We have 45 to 65 content farms churning volume. Listen, if you're going to have a website churning volume, pushing new posts every day, good luck with that, right? It's going to be difficult. Then you have thin affiliate review sites and then you have, which is very relevant for us, location template pages, the same page with the city swapped. So, lazy microsites are in the blast radius.

3:04So, on this channel we talk about microsites, which is a website you build, you rank it in Google, you get leads coming to that website, you can sell them or you can run them yourself to make money, right? Lazy microsites are definitely in the blast radius. So, location template pages, the same page with the city swapped, get hit hard. Why am I not terribly concerned? Because I'm kind of happy about this because old school rank and rent websites are going to get crushed, right? That's my opinion because they use templated content over and over again because they had to do

3:34this manually, right? They had to write these blog posts manually. Therefore, it was all templated. So, the crackdown is a moat, not a wall. I'm I'm very happy about it. Every single competitor that gets wiped out is a spot on page one that opens up, right? Google is doing the hard work of clearing the field and it's clear not the lazy operators first.

3:54Now, I want to give you more information. I want to tell you that there's third-party companies that are going out and banning AI content for their own purposes that are aside from Google that may one day link up with Google. I know what tools they're using. I know how to circumvent those tools. I don't recommend it, but it's all possible, but I can't talk about it here on YouTube, right? We just can't do it.

4:13A lot of people don't want to talk about it, and that's fine. I can understand that. But, if you want to come into the Rank Expander Academy, this is where I spend most of my day. This is a community of over 700 people, one of the fastest growing communities right now for AI and SEO, how to build microsites, how to make money on Upwork. We have a rolodex of backlinks if you want to use from the DR 30 all the way up to 70. The point is, some things I just can't talk about on YouTube because it is a cat

4:37mouse game. Now, if you are seriously concerned, this is what I recommend. So, get rid of your footprints, right? We can talk about a bunch of different things we can do, but this is huge. Get rid of your footprints. So, number one is no copy paste pages. So, each one is semantically unique. Stop the templated content. My goodness gracious, we have AI, we have Claude, we have GBT that can make everything unique, every page unique. Why are we using templated stuff anymore, right? No overnight dumps, so publish at a human pace a few times as a baseline, right? If you're accustomed to

5:06doing one blog post a day for the last 10 months, don't jump it up to 10 blog posts a day. And by the way, we don't even use blog posts, right? For local business websites, for microsites, it's just not needed in my opinion. A real about us and contact pages. So, a site that looks like a business because it is one. Original detail on the page, a real price range, a real local reference, a real photo. Listen, never forget this.

5:28You have two big risks. You have algorithmic risk, right? which is just data, math coming onto your website, crawling around. But, you also have the human risk where someone literally comes onto your website and pokes around and uses human judgment. You have to be able to pass both of these things. Now, I'm going to speak directly to those who are building microsites because there's quite a lot of people. So, and this does relate to a lot of different websites, but engagement is the tell. So, the biggest tell for Google is engagement.

5:55Unless they start banning AI content just straight up. Like if they start mathematically figuring out if your content is AI and banning it, then we have a different problem. Different problem. But right now it's like a scaled content abuse problem, so an engagement is the tell. So, if someone comes and they stay and they read and they call the pages safe. How we build our microsites is that we have a 24/7 AI agent answer your phone calls.

6:15Therefore, engagement is off the roofs on our websites. That's why they rank well a portion. And stand-alone do not build a network. A lot of people see my videos like, "You're building a PBN, a private blog network." No, I'm not because none of these websites are linked together. They're all unique, right? And the microsite method was built for all this. So, what gets wiped out? Duplicate template pages, hundreds of published overnight, no real service or phone and intellect page farm. What we build is semantically unique pages, one focused site at a time, a real contractor who can answer or an AI agent

6:45and separate stand-alone websites, right? It's built for this. And this is what excites me. So, the slop dies, the rent survives. So, you have slop farms wiped, right? You have There's going to be this this this whole and it's already happening, right? This whole thing where websites are going to get wiped off the internet and that opens up opportunities. Their rankings are going to open up. Your useful site rises and then you get calls. Your ranking rent website is making more money than ever.

7:11There's more we can talk about, but we have a 7-day free trial right now with the Rank Expander Academy. Come in here, hit the start button and you're going to see exactly how things work. You're going to see a community of people helping each other. You can see Brandon here had 300 plus leads Friday through Tuesday. I think he had a recent post, too. He had the 58 leads from one client on a Sunday. Like people are doing the things here and if you want to stay ahead of the pack, this is where it's at.