Definition
Commodity content: definition and test
Commodity content is content a competitor could have published in your place, losing nothing. It restates what already exists, brings no proprietary data and describes no lived situation. Since AI has collapsed its production cost, this is the criterion that separates an indexed page from an ignored one, whatever tool wrote it.
Where the idea comes from
Google presented this distinction on April 21, 2026, in Toronto, at its first Search Central Live event in Canada. Danny Sullivan (Google's public liaison for Search) illustrated it with a running shoe retailer. On one side, general tips on choosing running shoes, which any site in the industry can publish. On the other, the analysis of a specific pair that wore out after 400 miles, which only the retailer who examined it can write. AI has brought down the cost of generic content, so Google has raised the bar for what deserves to enter its index.
How to recognize it
Five questions are enough, whatever the writing tool:
- Does the page contain data from your own measurement?
- Does it describe a real situation, including what did not work?
- Does it take a side on a debated point in your industry?
- Has every figure been checked against its original source?
- Could a direct competitor have published it as is?
The last question sums up the others. A page a direct competitor could have published as is is commodity content, whether it was written by hand or with AI.
What it can cost
The cost does not take the form of a penalty. It shows in Search Console, where commodity pages can end up with the status “Crawled, currently not indexed”: Google read them and did not keep them. A site that publishes hundreds of interchangeable pages at once may also see Google reduce the resources it spends crawling it.
A heat pump installer publishes “How to choose a heat pump”, a text all its competitors can write the same day. It then publishes a page on the three breakdowns it repairs most often after a winter, with its real response times.
The first page is commodity content. The second can only come from this installer: it is the one with a reason to enter the index and to convince a customer.
We read commodity content as a budget risk, not a detection risk. Google assesses what a page brings, never the tool used to write it. The real risk is publishing what all your competitors can publish the same day, whether or not the text was expensive.
The consequence often surprises: what must stay in-house is not the writing, it is the raw material. The objections your salespeople hear, the questions that keep coming back to customer service, the figures from your own files: thirty minutes with someone from sales are worth more than a day of writing.
Not to be confused with
- AI-generated content
- It is a mode of production. Google assesses the result: a text written by hand can be commodity content, and a text produced with AI may not be.
- Zero marginal cost content
- This notion describes the economics of production: a generative model makes the content at almost no cost. Commodity content describes its value to the reader and to Google, meaning what it brings that others do not have.
Related concepts
- Zero marginal cost content
- Crawled, currently not indexed
- Batch publishing
- E-E-A-T
- SEO writing
- Content marketing
Further reading
- Does Google penalize AI-generated content?
- Generative AI: how to adapt your content marketing strategy
- SEO writing with AI: how to create useful, well-structured content
- Publishing 100 pages at once: what are the SEO risks for a new site?
- Google E-E-A-T: what it means for content quality
Related services
Frequently asked questions
How do I know if my pages are commodity content?
Ask the question page by page: could a direct competitor have published it as is? The Page indexing report in Search Console also gives a clue when many pages sit under “Crawled, currently not indexed”.
