Commodity vs. Non-Commodity Content
In April 2026, Google’s Danny Sullivan stood on stage in Toronto and told a room of SEOs that AI has lowered the barrier to producing content, forcing Google to raise the bar for what actually gets indexed.
“Crawled, currently not indexed” is a signal that marks quality. One that indicates that your page may not even be worth indexing at all.
The vocabulary Google introduced for this is commodity versus non-commodity content. Since Toronto, the term has been picked apart across every SEO blog, and most have landed on the same conclusion: stop making commodity content, start making non-commodity content.
That reading is wrong, or at least incomplete enough to be unhelpful. Commodity content isn’t actually the problem. A brand and its content library made entirely of it is.
What commodity content actually means
A ‘commodity’ is anything produced at scale and easily substituted. Wheat is wheat. Oil is oil. It doesn’t matter much who you buy it from.
Commodity content works the same way. It isn’t the same thing as bad content. A piece can be well-researched, properly formatted and factually sound while still being entirely substitutable. If a competitor could publish something functionally identical by following the same brief, the piece is interchangeable by definition.
And most commodity content isn’t the output of a lazy writer, but rather a good writer given a brief that asked for nothing, only that they could deliver.
The one-line test everyone uses is “could ChatGPT have written this?”
A better one: could your closest competitor publish a functionally identical version of this page next Tuesday, working from the same brief, without access to anything you have?
If yes, you’ve produced something replaceable.
Where the term came from
This whole hot topic didn’t start with Google. The timeline actually looks more like:
- Basic economics. Substitutability, as above. The test was never about quality.
- Marketing, 2021. Kevin Indig named the content commodity trap: content sits on a commodity spectrum, and when it’s easy to replicate, you have a problem; differentiated content is a business moat.
- Google adopts the language in 2025 and 2026. In May 2025, Google’s guidance on succeeding in AI search included a line that got less attention than it deserved: focus on making unique, non-commodity content that visitors from Search and your own readers will find helpful and satisfying. Then came Toronto, where Sullivan set out what good non-commodity content looks like: unique, in that it brings a viewpoint or information others lack or can’t easily replicate; specific, in that it discusses a particular instance or situation rather than general rules and steps; and authentic, in that it demonstrates first-hand knowledge or expertise.
Underneath it all sits a mechanism that predates the vocabulary by years. Google filed a patent called “Contextual estimation of link information gain” in October 2018. An information gain score for a document (marked from 0 to 1) indicates the additional information it contains beyond what the user has already seen in documents they’ve viewed. It addresses the specific problem of search results where every page says essentially the same thing.
A patent is not a confirmed ranking factor, and Google has neither confirmed nor denied using information gain in its algorithm. What the patent demonstrates is intent: reward contribution, discount duplication.
What Google said, and what Google didn’t say
There is no commodity content update, named system, or even penalty. The most accurate description in circulation comes from Shaun Anderson at Hobo, who reads it as Helpful Content 2.0: an intensification of the existing people-first logic with a sharper edge. He also makes the point most articles skip, which is that commodity content isn’t dead. Google still surfaces it for quick facts, and for queries where that’s what people want. The risk is over-reliance on it as your primary strategy.
The mechanism of disadvantage is just structural. Commodity content fails to earn the signals that build long-term authority: links from sites that found something worth referencing, branded searches from readers who came back, engagement from people whose actual problem got solved.
Commodity content can absolutely work and fit within the broader content marketing strategy, and usually it should. You just can’t expect it to perform well consistently over a long period of time unchanged.
Commodity and non-commodity content do different jobs
Commodity content gets you admitted and covered
It’s how you appear for the obvious queries, how you answer the definitional questions your buyers ask early, and how you feed the knowledge bases that AI answer engines draw on. Glossaries are a good example: useful commodity assets that feed AI knowledge bases and, if built properly, win citations in answer engines and chatbots.
Non-commodity content gets you cited, linked and remembered
It’s what gives another site a reason to link to you rather than to a competitor covering the same ground. It’s what an AI engine pulls from when it needs something it can’t synthesise from the eleven near-identical pages above you. It’s what a buyer remembers three weeks later.
So the failure mode is just building a library entirely out of scaffolding and then wondering why there’s nothing load-bearing in it. A site made only of “what is X” and “top 10 tips for Y” has no asset that earns authority, and therefore no engine driving the rankings of everything else.
The substitution test
| Criterion | 0 points | 1 point | 2 points |
|---|---|---|---|
| Source of insight | Assembled from other articles | Some original input, mostly aggregated | First-hand experience or first-party data |
| Specificity | General rules and steps | Named context or industry | A specific instance, with the detail that proves it happened |
| Stake | No position taken | A soft preference | A position that could cost you an argument or a client |
| Replicability | A competitor could match it in a week | It would take them a month | They can’t, without access you have and they don’t |
| Proof | Assertion only | Cites a third party | Your own data, screenshot, artefact or result |
0 to 3: commodity. Fine if it’s deliberately scaffolding. A problem if it describes most of your site.
4 to 6: hybrid. Usually a good article with the proof left out. Your cheapest wins live here!
7 to 10: non-commodity. This is what earns links, citations and recall.
When you legally can’t share your client work
If you’ve found yourself deep in articles about commodity content, you may notice that every example given for non-commodity content is a retailer, an agent or a designer, all of whom can publish client anecdotes freely.
Try that in family law!
We often produce content for law firms and financial services. Privilege, professional advertising rules and the basic dignity of clients going through the worst year of their lives mean the most interesting material on any matter is permanently off limits. The same constraints apply in medicine, financial advice, insurance, and plenty of trades.
“Just share your experience” is useless advice in those industries.
Some ways we pivot around this include:
- Pattern content. You can’t discuss one matter, but you can discuss forty. “The first question clients ask in an initial consultation is almost never the one that decides the outcome” is a genuinely non-commodity insight that identifies nobody. Pattern recognition across volume is the single most under-used source of differentiated content in regulated sectors, and it’s unavailable to any competitor without the same caseload.
- Process transparency. What actually happens, in what order, at what cost, over what timeframe. Most regulated professionals treat their own process as boring because they live in it. To a buyer it’s the most useful thing on the site, and a competitor can only replicate it by describing their own process, which is a different page.
- First-party operational data. Not client data. Your data. Response times, matter durations, how often a particular route is taken, what proportion of enquiries arrive with a specific misconception.
- Third-party data. Honestly, repackaging data from government resources, industry bodies, and statistics sites into digestible, relevant and specific insights.
- Adversarial positions on industry practice. You can’t critique a client. You can absolutely critique a common practice in your profession and explain why you do it differently. Positions carry stake, and stake is one of the five criteria.
- De-identified composites, disclosed as such. A scenario assembled from several matters, clearly labelled as illustrative. Weaker than the real thing, still stronger than generic advice, and defensible.
5 TWELVE EXAMPLE 1 — national family law firm: Monthly, we brief the lawyers on topics to write about based on search behaviour, and they use a combination of these tactics across different content formats to make it their own. Lawyers often draw upon famous legal cases, ABS data, patterns across enquiries and clients, their own processes, and de-identified scenarios. This creates non-commodity content that keeps private matters private.
So, start by fixing content briefs
Most teams treat expert input as optional decoration, asking writers to add quotes if needed, which produces content where expertise validates a structure already assembled from other people’s articles.
If resources allow, it may be worth providing your expert writer (or asking your expert before you write) some questions relevant to your topic/theme. Questions such as:
- What do clients get wrong about this before they talk to you?
- What’s the advice everyone in your industry gives that you disagree with, and why?
- Tell me about the last time this went sideways. What did you do?
- If someone read the standard article on this topic and then walked into your office, what would you have to correct?
When the expert genuinely can’t be booked, the fastest alternative is to get them to spend thirty minutes on the finished piece answering three things: what would they add that isn’t there, what does it oversimplify, and what would they tell a client who came to them after reading it.
5 TWELVE EXAMPLE 2 — street poster distributor After refreshing all core pages of their site, we then jumped straight into evergreen blog content every fortnight. Commodity content. It has served the website well for over 2 years, expanding our brand coverage and reach internationally across search. Performance ebbs and flows, but the articles were well-written, with some client input after drafting to keep them aligned to the brand and data-centric. Every claim is backed with a link to a trusted source, and every image is original. PR became part of the strategy, and the blog content was not unique enough for pickups. We adapted, adding more data from sources such as City of Melbourne’s Pedestrian Counting System, interviewing their Artwork & Production manager before drafting, and incorporating case studies and other personal experiences to bolster the content. Not only have we won over links and media coverage, but that non-commodity attitude has spread contagiously across other channels.
What to do with the library you already have
- Improve the hybrids first. Pages scoring 4 to 6 are usually good articles missing their proof. Adding a data point, a position, or a practitioner’s correction costs a fraction of a new piece.
- Consolidate clusters. Several thin pieces covering overlapping ground almost always perform better as one authoritative page.
- Leave alone, mostly, the low scorers. This is the counterintuitive one. Low-value definitional pages are usually better deprioritised in internal linking than deleted. They’re doing the scaffolding job. Deleting them costs you coverage and gains you nothing. Just stop pointing your internal links and your budget at them.
If non-commodity content isn’t built to win the head term, you need to measure it differently, or you’ll conclude it failed.
Watch for citations in AI answers, referring domains you didn’t ask for, branded search volume, whether the piece shows up in sales conversations, and whether the rest of your library moves after the authority piece lands. Those are the signals that compound.
What you shouldn’t expect is for a specific, first-hand, genuinely irreplaceable article to outrank a comprehensive guide for a broad commercial keyword. That was never its job.
Where this leaves your content strategy
Simply put, commodity content is a business problem wearing an SEO costume.
Google never told you to stop publishing. The bar for admission has moved, and good SEO is largely a matter of having great content for people. The uncomfortable implication is that most content libraries were never built to clear that bar, because experts in the business were never asked (especially at the brief stage) what the brand’s content would say that another writer with the same sources couldn’t.
At 5 Twelve, we treat content strategy as an ongoing balancing act. An architecture built entirely on commodity content lacks the load-bearing authority to rank, while a library of pure non-commodity pieces often misses broad top-of-funnel search demand. Finding the right mix requires constant recalibration based on available resources, market positioning, and campaign timing.
As an SEO partner, this work is complex because organic search does not operate in a vacuum. We thrive in the strategic gaps, connecting search performance to wider brand marketing, web architecture, and multi-channel acquisition. Because no two businesses share the same constraints, risk tolerance, or subject-matter access, every content portfolio and strategy will look fundamentally different.
Ready to evaluate your own content library and build a strategy tailored to your market? Book a free strategy session with our team today.
