Veteran SEO consultant Marie Haynes says her manual action help requests went "from essentially no requests to several per week" — a shift she flagged publicly on X on October 7 — and other practitioners report the same pattern across the past few months.

The signal is anecdotal, not a confirmed Google statement. Google has not announced any change to its manual review operations, and no algorithm update or policy revision accompanies these reports. What exists is a cluster of practitioner observations plus forum activity that AI tools, asked to review Google Webmaster Help Forums, agreed shows more complaints than usual — though both ChatGPT and Gemini characterized the increase as moderate rather than a dramatic spike.

What are SEOs actually seeing?

Haynes, who has done manual action consulting for roughly two decades, posted: "Have had a big increase in requests for help with manual actions lately." The penalty types she is seeing include "thin content, pure spam, and scaled content."

She added a notable caveat: "Most of these sites are legitimate long standing businesses." And she put the volume in perspective: "It's not nearly as high as the pre-Penguin manual action era, but interesting considering I don't actively talk about or advertise consulting around manual actions anymore."

Daniel Foley Carter corroborated the trend in his own October 7 post: "Google Manual Actions are appearing in so many places - the last few months I've been seeing more and more popping up."

Why might this be happening now?

Foley Carter tied the increase directly to industry behavior around AI-generated content. In his telling, businesses cut SEO spend because AI could do the work cheaply, lower-end and spammy SEOs turned to AI for scale, and the resulting violations — particularly scaled content abuse — are now drawing human review.

"Businesses cheaped out on SEO or cut spend because AI could do it," he wrote. "SEOs at the lower end or spammy end turned to it for scale and now people like me are part of the clean up and recovery solution."

He also quantified the stakes: manual actions "can be devastating - often bringing entire sites down with some losing 90%+ of their traffic overnight."

Which manual actions are in play?

Foley Carter listed the penalty categories site owners may face as Google ramps up enforcement around scaled content and spam. They include:

• Back button hijacking — the site interferes with browser history so visitors can't use the Back button as expected
• Third-party spam abuse — a significant part of the site publishes spam, often via forums, uploads or free hosting
• User-generated spam — spam posted by visitors in comments, forums or profiles
• Spammy free host — a significant share of sites on a free hosting service are spammy
• Structured data issues — markup that misdescribes content
• Unnatural links to and from the site — artificial or manipulative link patterns
• Thin content — pages with little unique value, such as thin affiliate pages, scraped content or doorway pages
• Cloaking and sneaky redirects — Google sees different content than visitors do
• Hidden text and keyword stuffing
• Cloaked images, AMP content mismatch and sneaky mobile redirects
• Major spam problems — repeated or egregious spam-policy violations
• Site reputation policy violations — third-party content inconsistent with Google's policy

Per Foley Carter's description of the process, these actions appear in Google Search Console after a quality rater visits a site and makes a determination, or after automated spam systems flag suspicious patterns, user-submitted spam reports or routine quality sweeps surface a property.

How strong is the evidence?

Context matters here. A decade ago, manual action complaints were extremely common. They then faded as Google's algorithms absorbed most enforcement work. The current uptick, if real, does not approach pre-Penguin volumes — but it reverses a long decline, and it lands while Google's March 2024 crackdown era spam policies around scaled content abuse remain active context for practitioners.

The verification effort so far is informal. A manual scan of Google Webmaster Help Forums turned up a batch of recent manual action threads, and both ChatGPT and Gemini, asked to chart complaint volume, agreed on an increase — while producing charts that disagreed with each other on its magnitude.

What should site owners watch next?

Watch Search Console manual action reports over the coming weeks, especially for sites running scaled or AI-assisted content programs, user-generated content sections, or affiliate-heavy page templates — the categories practitioners say are drawing the most enforcement. A statement from Google, or a sustained forum trend, would move this from practitioner observation to confirmed policy shift.