Google just made some "AI SEO" packages spam

A guy who runs a used car lot in Avon forwarded me a proposal two weeks ago. An agency wanted twenty four hundred dollars a month to get him "ranked inside ChatGPT and Google's AI answers." The deliverable was fifty landing pages. Best Used Cars in Avon. Best Used Cars in Plainfield. Same three paragraphs, same stock photo of a handshake, a different Hendricks County town dropped into the headline each time.

He asked me if it was worth the money. It isn't. And as of this year, it might get his whole site in trouble with Google too.

What did Google change?

On May 15, 2026, Google rewrote its Search spam policy. The old definition of spam covered techniques used to rank content highly. The new one adds a second target: "attempting to manipulate generative AI responses in Google Search." That means AI Overviews and AI Mode, the two features that now answer a huge share of searches before a user ever clicks a link.

Google didn't stop at publishing the new language. Between June 24 and June 26, its SpamBrain system ran a global enforcement pass, the second spam update of 2026, checking sites against the May policy and a related June 15 deadline on deceptive page patterns. Sites built around the old tricks started losing rankings that week, and some lost visibility in AI answers specifically.

What does "AI answer manipulation" mean?

Google's own examples read like a description of the car lot's proposal. One is what people in the SEO world call recommendation poisoning: articles like "Best CRMs for Small Businesses 2026," built to get repeated by an AI system until it associates a brand with a category, whether or not a reader learns anything.

The other is scaled content, generated by AI with barely any real editing, built as hundreds of near-duplicate pages targeting a city, an industry, or both. "What is the best [service] in [town]" times fifty. If you've been pitched a "local AI SEO" package that promised a page for every town within thirty minutes of your shop, that's the pattern.

Is the car lot's proposal against the rules?

Close enough that I'd assume yes. Fifty pages, one template, a swapped city name, and a stated goal of getting cited by an AI tool rather than informing a shopper. Google's documentation says repeated or clear violations can lead to a manual action, which can mean the pages get filtered out or, in worse cases, the whole domain takes a visibility hit.

Fifty pages that only swap the city name look like spam to Google for the same reason they look like spam to you.

Twenty four hundred dollars a month for that proposal comes to just under twenty nine thousand dollars a year. That's more than the cost of building a real seven-page website outright, and it comes with a real chance of getting your domain flagged instead of ranked.

So does anything work for AI answers?

Yes, and it's less work than fifty pages. A specific page about your actual shop, written by someone who knows it, with real photos and a Google Business Profile that matches. AI systems pull from the same signals a careful human reader trusts: named details, dates, and a source that clearly knows the subject. One honest page tends to outlast fifty templated ones, because it isn't the kind of thing Google wrote a policy to catch.

Before you sign anything with a vendor selling "AI visibility" or "AI SEO," ask them one question: would this page still make sense if I deleted the city name from the headline? If the answer is no, you already know what you're buying.

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The used car lot in Avon already had a real story. Family owned, twenty two years on the same stretch of US 36, financing for people two banks already turned down. That story fits on one page. Nobody has to hide the city name to make it true.

Sources

#	Source	What it backed up
1	Spam Policies for Google Web Search	Google's official spam policy, including the language covering manipulation of generative AI responses.
2	Google confirms spam policies apply to AI Overviews and AI Mode	Details and date (May 15, 2026) of the policy language change.
3	Google's Spam Policies Now Apply to Attempts to Manipulate AI	Description of recommendation poisoning and scaled GEO content as the targeted tactics.
4	Google June 2026 Spam Update Is Done Rolling Out	Rollout dates (June 24 to June 26, 2026) for the enforcement pass.
5	Google Finishes Rolling Out The June 2026 Spam Update	Confirms the update as the second spam update of 2026 and its scope.