Commodity Content

Commodity content is content built from common knowledge that anyone, or any AI model, could produce, so it adds little a reader could not find elsewhere. Google uses the term in its May 15, 2026 guide to optimizing for generative AI features in Search and contrasts it with 'non-commodity' content based on first-hand experience or expertise.

Google's guide gives a concrete pair of examples. A post like '7 Tips for First-Time Homebuyers' is commodity content: it 'is often based on common knowledge, which could originate from anyone, and typically adds little unique insight for readers'. A post like 'Why We Waived the Inspection & Saved Money: A Look Inside the Sewer Line' is non-commodity content, because it 'provides unique expert or experienced takes that go beyond common knowledge and the ordinary'. The guide tells site owners not to 'recycle what others on the internet have already said, or could easily be produced by a generative AI model'.

Google ranks this above everything else in the guide. Creating content that people find unique, compelling and useful 'will likely influence your website's presence in generative AI search in the long run more than any of the other suggestions in this guide', it says. The rest of the document is mostly about what not to do: no special files such as llms.txt, no chunking content for AI, no rewriting content specially for AI systems, and no chasing inauthentic mentions.

The reasoning follows from how AI Overviews and AI Mode work. Google describes both as using retrieval-augmented generation and query fan-out over its Search index. When dozens of pages say the same thing, the model can take that fact from any of them, and the generated answer already covers the common knowledge, so none of those pages is needed as a source. A page with an original dataset, a test result or a named expert's view is harder to substitute and more likely to be linked as support. The idea overlaps with information gain, which asks what a page adds beyond the documents a reader has already seen.

Typical signs of commodity content:

• definitions and tip lists that match the top ten results almost line for line
• AI-written rewrites of existing articles with no new facts
• no author with relevant experience, no data, no examples from real use
• year-stamped refreshes where only the title changed

Making content non-commodity usually means adding something only you have: first-party data, customer case studies, product testing, pricing and implementation details, local specifics, or a clear and defended opinion. These map closely to the experience and expertise parts of E-E-A-T and to Google's guidance on helpful content.

Commodity content is not a spam category by itself. It becomes a policy problem when it is produced in bulk to capture rankings or AI answers, which Google treats as scaled content abuse. Writing with AI content generation tools is also not the problem, but drafts left at the level of common knowledge are commodity content by definition.

A practical test is to compare a page with the sources AI systems already cite for the prompts it targets. If the page makes no claim, shows no data and offers no perspective those sources lack, it is a commodity. Promptwatch's content gap analysis scores how well a site's pages cover the fan-out queries behind each tracked prompt, which gives a starting list of topics where the site has nothing distinctive to offer yet.