There is a phrase that should worry anyone running a large website: “lost faith.” It is not the sort of thing you want said about your domain by the people who decide whether it shows up in Google at all. Yet that is exactly the language Google’s John Mueller used this week when discussing sites built on programmatic SEO, and it is worth unpacking what it actually means for anyone tempted by the tactic.
What Mueller actually said
Responding to a site owner on Bluesky, Mueller was asked about a struggling website built by cycling through combinations of domain names, technologies and attributes to generate page after page automatically. His reply was blunt. He explained that this kind of build is easy for a developer to produce, especially with code generation tools now doing the heavy lifting, but the result is usually a large volume of pages that each carry “some” value while the site as a whole falls flat.
He went further, stating that programmatic SEO of this sort often produces a site that is “either spam, borderline spam, or low quality.” The line that will stick with most SEOs, though, was this one: Google’s systems can end up losing faith in a site’s ability to provide genuine value to users, based on a pattern built up across its older pages.
Why “losing faith” is worse than a single penalty
A manual action or an algorithmic filter tends to target something specific. Losing faith is different. It suggests Google’s systems have formed a broader view of the domain itself, built from thousands of thin, templated pages, and that view now colours how new and existing content on the same site gets treated.
Mueller made clear that recovering from this position is not quick. He described the fix as requiring time and significant effort to demonstrate genuine value, and compared it to the sort of long, grinding recovery work SEOs undertake after a core update or a spam-related drop. There is no quick technical patch. Trust, once eroded at a domain level, has to be rebuilt page by page.
What counts as programmatic SEO
Not every templated page is a problem. Product listings, location pages for a genuine multi-branch business, or job listings pulled from a database all use repeatable structures and can still offer real value, provided each page answers a distinct, specific need.
The pattern Mueller was describing is different: pages generated purely by permutation, such as combining every city name with every service, or every technology term with a generic “what does X mean” style question, with little unique content behind them. The volume looks impressive in a crawl report. The value to an actual visitor is often close to nothing.
What this means if you are running a large site
The takeaway is not that scale is bad. It is that scale without differentiation is a liability. A thousand pages built from the same three sentences swapped around a keyword variable will not out-rank a hundred pages that were genuinely researched and written for a real search intent, and worse, they can drag the rest of the domain down with them in Google’s estimation.
If any of this sounds familiar, an honest content audit is the sensible next step, working out which templated pages actually earn traffic and engagement, and which ones exist purely to pad a sitemap. Anyone unsure where their own site stands can start with our SEO services, which include exactly this kind of audit work, or read how we have approached recovery and growth for other businesses in our case studies.
It is also worth remembering that “value” is increasingly judged beyond the traditional ten blue links. As AI-driven answers and tools such as ChatGPT and Gemini pull from the web, thin, duplicated content is even less likely to be surfaced or cited, which is a growing part of why we now build AI search visibility into standard SEO strategy rather than treating it as an afterthought.
The practical fix
There is no shortcut here, and anyone promising one after reading Mueller’s comments should be treated with scepticism. What tends to work is:
- Auditing existing programmatic pages against real search demand and actual traffic, not assumed demand.
- Merging or removing pages that exist only because a template allowed it.
- Adding genuine, specific detail to pages that are worth keeping.
- Slowing the rate of new page generation until quality catches up with quantity.
- Monitoring recovery over months, not weeks, since Mueller’s own framing suggests this is a long process.
If a site has been affected by this kind of trust erosion, or a technical or content issue is holding rankings back more broadly, our team offers on-going website maintenance and support alongside the audit and strategy work, so problems get caught before they compound.
The bottom line
Mueller’s comments are a reminder that Google is not simply counting pages or matching keywords. It is forming a judgement about whether a domain, as a whole, is worth sending users to. Programmatic SEO can still work when it produces pages people genuinely need. It becomes a liability the moment it becomes a numbers game. Anyone building at scale would do well to ask, honestly, which category their site falls into before Google answers the question for them.
If that audit sounds overdue, get in touch and we will take an honest look at what is holding your site back.
Graig Upton
Graig Upton is a UK SEO and Google Ads consultant with 23 years of hands-on digital marketing experience. Google certified in Ads, Analytics and Conversions, he has helped businesses ranging from local providers to national brands - including Nando's and Financial Times - dominate search and scale their leads. Based in Preston, working with clients across the UK.