At Google Search Central Live in Toronto on April 21, 2026, Danny Sullivan drew a clear line between two types of content. Commodity content: generic, easily replicable, the same topics covered the same way across hundreds of sites. Non-commodity content: specific, experience-driven, original, proprietary insight. Google’s recommendation was direct. Stop publishing the first kind. Start publishing more of the second.
This is essentially Information Gain repackaged as official, plain-language Google guidance.
What Sullivan Actually Said
The “unique, non-commodity content” language wasn’t entirely new. John Mueller had used it in a Search Central blog post in May 2025. But Sullivan’s Toronto presentation gave it sharper definition with concrete industry examples that make the concept easier to apply.
The interior designer example is the most quotable. Commodity content: “2024 Kitchen Trends You Need to See” with stock photos of green cabinets and brass hardware found on Pinterest. Non-commodity content: “Marble vs. Grape Juice: Why I Refused to Install Stone for a Family of Five,” a video showing actual stain tests with grape juice and turmeric to prove the point. Sullivan used similar contrasts for running stores and real estate.
The pattern is consistent. Commodity content can be produced by anyone with no real experience in the space. Non-commodity content requires that someone actually did something, learned something, or has access to information that isn’t already published everywhere else.
What “Commodity Content” Actually Means
Commodity content is content that is easy to reproduce. It usually covers a familiar topic in a familiar way, often using the same structure, the same talking points, and the same generalized advice found across dozens or hundreds of other pages. It is not necessarily wrong. It is not always low quality. But it is interchangeable. If one page disappeared, another could fill the gap with no real loss.
Non-commodity content contains something that’s hard to replicate. Direct experience. Original analysis. Proprietary information. Specific examples. Practitioner judgment. Contextual insight. It gives the reader something more than a reorganized summary of public knowledge.
The clearest self-test I’ve seen comes from Shaun Anderson at Hobo: “Would this be irrevocably lost if this page disappeared tomorrow?” If the answer is no, it’s commodity content.
A second test, from Florian Krückel at SEO Kreativ, sharpens the same idea: “Could ChatGPT write this in 90 seconds, and would the result be essentially identical?” If yes, rewrite it or skip it.
Both tests are useful. The first one focuses on what would be lost. The second one focuses on what’s already easy to produce. Either framing gets you to the same conclusion.
The Information Gain Connection
A few weeks ago I wrote about Information Gain and the Google patents behind it. The 2006 patent (US8140449B1) describes a system that scores documents based on how much novel content they contain relative to all other documents on the same topic. It’s the mechanism for measuring exactly what Sullivan is describing in plain language.
The patent says: pages that introduce information nuggets and entity interactions absent from the rest of the corpus score better. Sullivan says: publish content that contains something other sites don’t have.
Same idea. Different framing.
What’s notable about the commodity content guidance is that it’s official Google language, not a patent that may or may not be in active use. The patent gave us the mechanism. This gives us the editorial test. Both are pointing at the same underlying truth: content that adds something new to the conversation has a structural advantage. Content that restates what’s already out there does not.
Why This Matters More Now
Two things have changed that make commodity content more dangerous than it used to be.
AI has lowered the cost of producing commodity content to nearly zero. Anyone can prompt ChatGPT to produce a competent, generic guide on any topic in seconds. That floods the index with interchangeable pages and forces Google to raise its quality bar to find anything worth surfacing. Google has talked about scaled content abuse and the “Crawled, currently not indexed” signal as quality flags. The bar isn’t moving up because Google decided to be picky. It’s moving up because the volume of commodity content has exploded.
AI Overviews and answer engines are also very good at summarizing common knowledge. If your page is commodity content covering common knowledge, AI systems compress it into summaries with no need to send the user to your site. Non-commodity content, with specific anecdotes and proprietary insight, has the kind of citable detail that gets pulled directly into AI responses with attribution. Commodity content gets summarized away. Non-commodity content gets cited.
This connects to the AirOps and Kevin Indig study I covered last week. Pages with focused, specific content outperformed exhaustive guides. Pages whose headings closely matched the query outperformed pages with broad coverage. The commodity vs. non-commodity framing explains why. Specific is harder to commoditize than broad. Experience-driven is harder to replicate than synthesized.
The Honest Caveat
“Commodity content” is not an officially confirmed ranking signal. It’s a strategic recommendation from Google, not a defined penalty or scoring mechanism. Some commodity content is necessary on most sites. A definitions page, a basic explainer, a foundational topic, those have their place.
The problem isn’t publishing any commodity content. The problem is building your entire content strategy on it. If most of your pages could be replicated by any competitor in 90 seconds, your site doesn’t have a differentiated reason to exist in search results.
The commodity content framing is a strategic lens, not a checklist. It tells you what kind of content is increasingly hard to win with, not what you can never publish.
How to Apply This
This is a self-audit, not an editorial overhaul.
Pull a list of your top pages. Read them. Ask the test questions: would this be irrevocably lost if it disappeared? Could ChatGPT write something essentially identical in 90 seconds? If a page fails the test, it doesn’t necessarily need to be deleted. It needs something added that only you could provide.
Specific things you can add:
- Original data from your own work, your clients, your audits, or your industry
- Specific examples with names, numbers, and outcomes, not generic case studies
- Direct quotes from practitioners, customers, or subject matter experts
- Failed experiments and what you learned from them
- Photos, videos, or screenshots of actual work
- Decisions you made that contradict standard advice, with the reasoning behind them
- Industry-specific knowledge that requires real experience to know
The pattern across all of these is that they require something other than synthesis of public information. They require that you, or someone you have access to, actually did something or knows something that isn’t already on the first page of Google.
The tactical move isn’t to publish less. It’s to make sure each page has at least one thing that wouldn’t appear on a competitor’s version of the same content. One specific data point. One real example with a name and a number. One opinion you can defend with experience. That’s the threshold between commodity and non-commodity, and it’s lower than people think.
The Takeaway
Information Gain explained the mechanism. The 2006 patent, the entity interactions, the depth weighting, all of it describes how Google can measure whether a page contributes novel content to a topic. Sullivan’s Toronto talk explained the editorial test in plain language. Both are saying the same thing.
If your page can be replaced by any of the other pages ranking for the same query, you’re not adding anything to the search results. You’re filling space.
The cost of that has gone up. AI has made commodity content cheap to produce, which means there’s more of it, which means Google’s bar for what gets indexed and surfaced has risen. AI Overviews and answer engines compress commodity content into summaries that don’t link back. The middle of the distribution, content that’s fine but not differentiated, has gotten harder to win with.
The fix is the same one it’s always been. Add something to the conversation that wouldn’t be there without you.
Read the Search Engine Roundtable coverage of Sullivan’s Toronto presentation.
