Programmatic SEO
Programmatic SEO is the industry's name for building many web pages from one template and a table of data, each aimed at a slightly different search, like one page per town. Google's spam policies don't name it. What they ban is scaled content abuse: lots of pages made mainly to push rankings rather than help people, whatever tool made them.
Source: Google Search Central, Spam policies for Google web search (scaled content abuse, doorway abuse), checked October 29, 2026
What Programmatic SEO means for your business
For a local business, the usual version is a page for every town you serve. Google's doorway policy names that pattern when it goes wrong: pages aimed at different regions or cities that all funnel visitors to one place. Its 2026 guide to AI search adds that making separate pages for every way people might phrase a search, including the extra searches AI tools run, breaks the scaled content policy when it's done mainly to sway rankings or AI answers.
We don't mind templates. A page per product, each holding that product's own specs and photos, is built from a template too, and it helps the shopper. The test we'd use is whether each page holds facts the others don't. A town page earns its place with something true about that town, like the jobs you've done there, the permits it needs or how soon you can get there. If only the town name changes, the pages start to look like what Google's doorway policy calls substantially similar pages, and we'd fold them into one.
If you've got a stack of town pages that read the same apart from the name, we'd help you cut them back to the ones worth reading.
Last reviewed October 29, 2026. All terms
How AI answers it today
On October 29, 2026, Google's AI Overview cited SEO tool blogs, Zapier, YouTube and Reddit, named no Google policy and framed the risk as "penalties." ChatGPT gave a template-and-data definition, named scaled content abuse as the risk and cited nothing.
Our run through ChatGPT and Google's AI Overview, October 29, 2026. A sample, not what every buyer sees.
Related terms in answers and how content gets used
Find out where your brand stands.
Tell us what you're trying to figure out. We'll get back to you within one business day with a time to talk.