Doorway pages
Doorway pages are pages or sites made to rank for many similar searches that send visitors on to another page before they reach what they want. Google lists doorway abuse in its spam policies, which say sites that break them may rank lower or not appear in results at all.
Source: Google Search Central, Spam policies for Google web search (updated August 28, 2026), Doorway abuse, checked October 29, 2026
What Doorway pages means for your business
Google gives four examples: several websites with small changes to the address and home page; domains or pages aimed at different cities or regions that funnel people to one page; pages made to steer visitors into the useful part of a site; and near-identical pages that read more like search results than a site you can browse.
A doorway exists to catch a search and hand the person along, which is what all four examples share. A page that answers the search itself, with the details the person came for, doesn't fit the pattern. Whether a page for each town you serve is worth having is a question we take up under programmatic SEO.
Doorways can also be left over from old work. Old campaign landing pages, a second domain bought for a keyword, or a block of pages a past vendor built can all match Google's examples. We'd list every page that gets search visits, check where each one sends people, and merge or redirect the ones that only pass visitors along.
If an old vendor left you with pages or extra domains that only exist to catch searches, sorting out which to keep, merge or redirect is work we'd do early.
Last reviewed October 29, 2026. All terms
How AI answers it today
On October 29, 2026, Google's AI Overview cited Wikipedia, Google's 2015 blog post on doorways, a black-hat SEO subreddit, SEO plugin blogs and YouTube, but not the current spam policy. ChatGPT used a city-page example, set doorways against real landing pages and cited nothing.
Our run through ChatGPT and Google's AI Overview, October 29, 2026. A sample, not what every buyer sees.
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