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After Google’s June Spam Update, Cut the Pages You Only Built for AI Overviews

Crontent

Google’s June spam update finished in about 48 hours. For some sites, that was enough time for a whole chunk of “AI search strategy” to turn into a liability.

The useful read on this update is simple. Google seems to have moved from warning about AI-answer manipulation in May to enforcing it in late June. If you run a tiny SaaS, you do not need a new growth framework. You need a kill list.

What pages should I remove after Google’s spam update?

Start with the pages you would never have published if AI Overviews did not exist.

Per Joseph Charnin’s write-up, Google updated its spam policy on May 15, 2026 to add “AI manipulation” as a spam category. He points to named violations like “recommendation poisoning,” biased “best X” listicles aimed at AI Overviews, and buying or exchanging AI citations.

Then came the June 24 to 26 spam update. Charnin’s read is that this was the first real enforcement pass through SpamBrain. Google defined the rule in May. June looked like the technical rollout.

Not every source says this with the same confidence. SEO Kreativ is more cautious. It notes that Google did not publicly name a target category for the June update, and calls the AI-spam angle plausible but unproven. That matters. We should not pretend Google published a neat list of what got hit.

But even with that caveat, the operator move is the same: audit the pages that were built mainly to influence answer engines instead of helping buyers.

The risky pages all have the same smell

The pages worth cutting share two traits: weak user value and obvious citation intent.

For a small SaaS team, the danger zone looks like this:

  • “Best tools” listicles where your product magically lands near the top
  • Comparison pages with no screenshots, no hands-on testing, and no real tradeoffs
  • Glossary pages padded out because answer engines like short definitions
  • “Top alternatives” pages written by someone who never used the products
  • Thin AI-generated pages built to cover every adjacent keyword

Charnin calls out biased listicles aimed at AI Overviews directly. Spilt Media adds the broader warning that spam updates are enforcement passes, not normal ranking reshuffles. If SpamBrain flags a site, the hit can be “sudden and severe,” not a slow decline.

That is the part tiny teams should care about.

If you have 20 weak pages, you can rewrite them. If you have 2,000 vendor-made SEO pages spread across your domain, one bad update can turn cleanup into your full-time job.

Use a three-bucket audit instead of arguing about GEO vs SEO

Do not overthink this.

Label every page on your site with one of these three buckets:

  1. Product proof
    Pages that show the product in use. Screenshots. Setup steps. Customer results. Failure cases. Pricing details. Stuff a real buyer would want before they sign up.
  2. Buyer education
    Pages that help someone understand the problem, evaluate options, or make a decision. Clear explanation. Honest tradeoffs. Specific use cases.
  3. Citation bait
    Pages built mainly to get picked up by AI answers or search snippets. Generic summaries. Empty comparison pages. Listicles with no evidence. Glossaries nobody would bookmark.

Keep the first two.

Prune, merge, or rewrite the third.

That is the workflow a 1-5 person team can actually run in a day or two.

Replace bait pages with proof-heavy pages tied to real buying intent

Google’s policy shift does not mean “stop using AI.” It means stop shipping pages that only make sense if a machine is the reader.

Safer replacements are boring in the best way. They are built from first-party evidence:

  • screenshots from the actual product
  • customer outcomes with numbers
  • implementation notes from real setups
  • edge cases and failure modes
  • pricing tradeoffs
  • migration guides
  • competitor comparisons that admit where your product loses
  • plain statements of who your product is not for

Those pages do more than reduce risk.

They also convert better.

A buyer deciding between tools does not need another polished “top 10” page. They need proof that you understand the job, the mess, and the tradeoffs.

SEO Kreativ also makes another important point: recovery from spam updates can take months after fixes, not days. So this is not a cute little content refresh project. If you think you have a pile of AI-bait pages live, the cheapest time to clean them up is before Google decides they count.

The test I’d use is blunt: if AI Overviews disappeared tomorrow, would this page still deserve to exist?

If the answer is no, put it on the kill list.

Then replace it with something only your company can publish. That is the version of content that still works when Google changes the rules again.

Sources