Google now filters 40 billion spam pages per day, a number Gary Illyes repeated at the Google Search Central Live Deep Dive in Europe, even as the volume of AI-generated junk the system must catch keeps climbing.

The three-day event, recapped by John Campbell at We Are Roast, framed the unusually heavy spam update cadence of 2026 as a direct response to a flood of new and machine-written content. "A high percentage of content is spam, and that is what the spam updates target," Campbell wrote, summarizing Google's messaging. "There have been more spam updates recently because there is so much more new content. The team is now using AI to help catch more of it."

What did Google say about AI slop in Discover?

Google acknowledged that AI-generated low-quality content is bleeding into Discover, the feed of personalized articles and short-form content shown in Search and the Google app. "AI slop is increasing, which means more poor quality content in the [Discover] feed," Campbell quoted the team as saying. "User feedback is really important here. It is what new spam filters are built from."

Why does Google keep changing how it judges quality?

Campbell listed three reasons Google laid out for ongoing quality rewrites:

• Content formats have expanded. Search has moved from ten blue links to far more media, and each format requires its own way of judging quality.
• Content breadth has grown. There are far more pages and sites than before. "Core updates don't focus on websites. They target content at page level, not at domain level," Campbell wrote. "That is why some pages on a site go up while others go down."
• Content issues have multiplied. Recent spam work targets cloaking, doorway pages, scraped content, link spam, and hacked content.

What is now a bigger problem than link spam?

Gary Illyes warned that scaled content has overtaken link spam as the dominant abuse vector. "Gary's warning was that scaled content is now becoming more of a problem than link spam," Campbell added. The implication for publishers running template-driven portfolios: a useful structure for 100 pages can lose most of its value when stretched across 10,000.

What are the pillars of quality?

In a follow-up post, Nacho Mascort translated the Search Central documentation into an audit checklist. He pointed to four pillars Google uses to assess quality — effort, originality, talent or skill, and accuracy — and to the supporting E-E-A-T signals already embedded in Search Quality Rater Guidelines. Aleyda Solís highlighted his commodity-content test on X, asking site owners a simple diagnostic: "If you replaced your brand with a competitor's, would the content still be just as useful? What makes your version worth choosing?"

The practical takeaway for editors and SEO leads runs across page types rather than domains: a single thin doorway, a scraped product description, or a 5,000-page programmatic play can now trigger a page-level demotion in the same core cycle that leaves neighboring URLs untouched.

What should publishers expect next?

Campbell ended his recap with a clear forward signal: "Expect more spam updates. Google is dealing with a growing flood of AI slop. Expect more spam updates and new spam thresholds. Scaled, low-effort content is the risk." Site owners should monitor Google Search Status dashboard entries for new spam update labels over the coming weeks, and track whether Discover-driven traffic from templated or AI-assisted articles drops before domain-wide rankings shift, since Google now scores each URL on its own merits.

The 40-billion-pages figure is not new — Campbell noted it was published "ages ago" — but pairing it with explicit AI detection and a Gary Illyes warning about scaled content signals that spam systems, not just core ranking signals, are the contested front of 2026 Search.