AI-written content and location pages

Google does not mind how a page was written. It minds whether the page is worth reading. Its guidance on generative AI content says AI can help with research and structure, and then sets three limits. We built DomainGuard's SEO advice around the same three.

What Google says

Making many pages without adding value is spam. Google's spam policies call it scaled content abuse: "using generative AI tools or other similar tools to generate many pages without adding value for users". The same policies call pages "targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page" doorway abuse. Google says sites that violate its spam policies may rank lower in results or not appear in results at all.

Check everything a tool wrote before you publish it. AI gets facts wrong. Google says to fact-check all of it, including the parts nobody reads closely: titles, meta descriptions, structured data and image alt text.

Structured data has to be true and visible. Markup must follow Google's structured data guidelines: it describes what a visitor can see on the page, it carries the required properties for its type, and it should pass the Rich Results Test.

Two smaller points from the same page. Telling readers how a piece was made (for example, "drafted with AI, checked by our team") helps them trust it. And if you sell through Google Merchant Center, AI-generated product images need the IPTC DigitalSourceType value TrainedAlgorithmicMedia in their metadata, and AI-generated product titles and descriptions have to be labelled as such.

What DomainGuard does about it

• Our AI never writes your copy. The AI fix summary, the per-page fixes, the domain fix plan and the agent brief describe each edit ("shorten the title so the service and town come first") and never write the replacement title, description, heading, alt text or structured data. A made-up title is as much a fabrication as a made-up DNS record, and whoever applies the plan would paste it as-is.
• Drafts come from your own page. Where a fix includes a draft title, description, alt text or structured data block, the scanner built it from your page's own words, labels it a draft, and says what it was built from. Check every fact in it before you use it.
• No page per town. The local SEO brief used to tell you to create a page for each phrase with no page, with a title template and "a few hundred words about the job". Across a few phrases and a few towns that is the doorway pattern. It now points you at the nearest existing page first, groups phrases that are one service, and suggests a new page only for a service you can fill with your own facts.
• Templated pages are flagged. The whole-site crawl compares pages with each other and reports groups whose main text is mostly the same, the city page copied for every town. See Whole-site crawl.
• Structured data is checked against the page. The scans flag markup claiming a rating no visitor can see, a phone number or street address that is not on the page, and missing properties Google requires. They also tell you when a business's rating of itself is in its markup, because Google never shows those as stars.
• Connected AI assistants get the same rules. Assistants using our MCP server are told not to mass-produce pages, to treat drafts as drafts, and to build structured data only from what the page shows.

When a page for a town is worth making

Make one when you have something true and specific to say about that town that does not fit anywhere else: jobs you have done there, photos of them, reviews from customers there, a branch or staff based there, rules or prices that differ. A reader in that town should learn something they would not get from your main service page.

If all you have is the town's name, don't make the page. Instead:

1. Make each service page strong: what the work involves, what it costs or how long it takes, photos of real jobs, the questions customers ask.
2. Keep one service-area page that lists the towns you cover, ideally with a line or a photo from work in each.
3. Fill in your Google Business Profile completely: the service area, every service, real photos, and a steady stream of reviews. For searches with a town in them, the map results come from the profile, not from a page per town.

If you already have a set of near-identical town pages, either rewrite each one around facts specific to it, or merge them into one page and 301-redirect the rest to it.

Common questions

Is AI-written content against Google's rules? No. Content made mainly to rank, without adding value, is, however it was made. A page an AI helped you write about work you really do is fine once you have checked it.

Why won't the AI just write my title? Because it would be guessing at facts about your business, and Google asks you to check titles and descriptions as carefully as the page itself. The draft on each finding is built from your page; edit it rather than starting from something invented.

Will removing my town pages hurt? Merging near-identical pages into one strong page, with 301 redirects from the old addresses, keeps what links and visitors the old pages had. What hurts is a pattern Google treats as spam.

Does FAQ markup still help? It does no harm, but Google stopped showing FAQ rich results for every site on 7 May 2026, and HowTo rich results in 2023. Add FAQ content when it answers real questions, not for the markup.