Well well well.. here we are at last, Google is having a content problem, so much content, so little compute. So now what do they do how does Google battle the content farms that are cranking content beyond measure? Well, of course, battle AI with your own AI. Last week in Barcelona, Gary Illyes said the quiet part out loud: "scaled content is now becoming more of a problem than link spam."
I can already see the LinkedIn posts. Half of them will say links don't matter anymore, because Google isn't even worried about them. The other half will say link builders can relax, because the heat moved somewhere else.
Both are wrong. Links didn't get less important. Faking them just stopped being the cheapest way to cheat.
Google filters out 40 billion spam pages a day, and it's now using AI to catch AI slop. Illyes shared the numbers at the Search Central Live Deep Dive in Barcelona (September 30 to October 2), and Search Engine Roundtable wrote them up this morning.
The short version:
Add it up and you get a trend. As Lily Ray points out, Google has released four spam updates in 2026, compared to one in 2025. She also lines up a month of documentation changes:
Her call: a big update is coming. Google usually rewrites the rules right before it enforces them.
Spammers don't really love links. They love whatever's cheapest.
For about fifteen years, the cheapest way to look important to Google was to fake the votes: PBNs, link farms, comment spam, $40 guest posts on sites nobody reads. Google spent a decade making those more expensive and more likely to blow up in your face. So the cheaters moved on.
Then generative AI made it nearly free to publish ten thousand pages before lunch. Now the cheap shortcut is pretending to be the content, not faking the votes for it. Of course scaled content is Google's biggest headache. It's the new bargain bin.
Notice what didn't move. A real editor at a real publication deciding your work is worth citing was hard in 2012, and it's hard now. You can't scale it with a prompt. That's not a bug in link building. That's the whole point of it.
The old shortcut didn't die, though. It got a new name.
If you've been on LinkedIn in the last six months, you've seen the pitch: "paid mentions" or "AI visibility placements" that will get your brand cited by ChatGPT. Pay a site, get a mention, and the robots will notice.
Lily Ray flags exactly this in her prediction post. If a paid placement passes ranking credit without a nofollow or sponsored tag, it breaks Google's link spam policy, no matter what the invoice calls it. Calling it GEO doesn't change what it is.
That's the part that worries me for buyers. The same people Google just spent a month warning about scaled content and fake authors are now selling "AI visibility." The packaging is new, but the footprint is the same old one.
An editorial link still pays in two currencies: rankings and AI citations. Scarcity is the reason both of them hold their value.
Google more or less confirmed the first currency in Barcelona. Illyes closed the event with "AI results are built on SEO infrastructure, SEO isn't dead." AI Overviews and AI Mode pull from the same system that ranks pages. If you don't rank, you don't get cited.
The second currency showed up in the same session. Alex Wright of iDHL shared a case study where 83% of a brand's AI citations came from sites the brand doesn't own (recap). There's a word for getting your name on sites you don't own. It's link building.
So here's the math as Google rolls out more spam updates:
Nobody outside Google knows when the next major update lands, or whether it lands at all. But recovering from a bad core update typically takes 3 to 6 months, and sometimes up to a year, per Illyes' own timing ranges (Search Engine Journal). Do your audit now, not later.
Five questions to ask about your link profile this week:
Google didn't say links matter less. It said the cheaters found something cheaper.
That's good news if you've been doing this the slow way. Each spam update clears out some of the competition, and each AI citation study keeps pointing back to the same place: sites you don't own, written by people who chose to mention you. The shortcut moved, but the hard thing didn't, and the hard thing still pays twice.