So someone asked a question that I think a lot of people need to hear the answer to especially right now given how much the landscape has shifted. They’ve been working on improving their site’s presence and want to know what the hard no’s are. The things that will genuinely hurt more then help when it comes to content and rankings. Good question and the answers are pretty clear.
Number one and this is the biggest one right now. Do not put AI generated content anywhere on your site that a human is supposed to read. I’m not talking about using AI to help with code or structure or technical stuff, that’s fine. I’m talking about having AI write your blog posts, your service pages, your product descriptions, and then just uploading that straight to your site. That will hurt your rankings. Google has gotten a lot better at detecting it and they’re actively pushing that content down. If you go generate fifty blog posts with ChatGPT and throw them all up to bulk out your site, your basically just telling Google your site is a content farm and they will treat it like one.
The second big one is duplicate content and more people fall into this trap then you’d think. Say you’re a pest control company and you want to rank in fifteen different cities. So you build fifteen location pages, copy paste the same text into all of them, and just swap out the city name. You now have fifteen pages that are essentially identical and Google does not like that. You’re not tricking anyone, the search engine sees exactly what you did. If you want to do location pages properly each one needs to be genuinely different with content that’s actually relevant to that specific area.
Another thing to avoid right now is building your website on one of those AI site generators. As of mid 2026 these platforms are not performing well in search. The way they generate code is more visual then readable and search engines, including the AI powered ones like Gemini and ChatGPT, tend to just see these sites as regurgitated content. Stick with proven platforms like WordPress. Even Wix is better than an AI generated site. If you already built something on one of those generators and want to use it for inspiration that’s fine, just rebuild it properly on a real platform.
And then two more that are kind of basics but worth saying anyway. If you delete a page that has backlinks pointing to it, redirect it to the new page with a 301 redirect. Don’t just delete it and move on. Those backlinks have value and if you don’t redirect them that value just disappears. And finally do not accidentally click the setting that tells search engines not to crawl your site. It sounds obvious but it happens more then you’d think especially when someone is setting up a new site and checks a box they don’t fully understand. Always make sure Google is allowed to read your pages.
