Non-commodity content is content that "provides unique expert or experienced takes that go beyond common knowledge and the ordinary," in Google's own words. Commodity content is the opposite: it is often based on common knowledge that could come from anyone, and it adds little that a reader could not find on ten other pages.
Checked against Google Search Central documentation and the Google Search Central Blog on October 20, 2026.
The term matters now because Google put it at the center of its official guidance for AI search. Its guide to generative AI features says that creating content 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." The rest of this post explains what Google means, how to tell which kind of page you have, and how to rewrite one into the other.
Google's definition of commodity and non-commodity content
The definition comes from Google's guide Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search, under the heading "Create valuable, non-commodity content for your audience." Google gives a pair of example titles:
| Commodity content | Non-commodity content | |
|---|---|---|
| Google's example | "7 Tips for First-Time Homebuyers" | "Why We Waived the Inspection & Saved Money: A Look Inside the Sewer Line" |
| Google's description | Often based on common knowledge "which could originate from anyone," and typically adds little unique insight | "Unique expert or experienced takes that go beyond common knowledge and the ordinary" |
| Who could write it | Anyone, or a generative AI model | Only the person or team who lived it |
| What the reader gets | A summary of what is already known | A specific decision, its reasoning and its outcome |
The homebuyer pair shows the difference well. Seven tips for first-time buyers could be assembled from any search. The sewer line story could only be written by someone who made that call on a real house, saw what the inspection would have covered, and can say what happened next. The first title promises information. The second promises experience.
The same section of the guide adds a test you can use on any draft: "Don't just recycle what others on the internet have already said, or could easily be produced by a generative AI model." It also contrasts a first-hand review, which "provides a unique perspective based on personal experience," with a summary of existing content, which "simply restates information already available elsewhere."
Where the term comes from
Google has used the phrase for more than a year:
- May 21, 2025: a Google Search Central Blog post by John Mueller, Top ways to ensure your content performs well in Google's AI experiences on Search, told site owners to "Focus on making unique, non-commodity content that visitors from Search and your own readers will find helpful and satisfying."
- May 15, 2026: Google announced the generative AI optimization guide on the Search Central Blog. The first item it lists is "Guidance on the importance of providing valuable, unique, non-commodity content."
- July 10, 2026: the date the guide itself shows as last updated when we checked it.
The idea behind it is older. Google's page on creating helpful, reliable, people-first content has long asked whether content provides "original information, reporting, research, or analysis" and "substantial value when compared to other pages in search results." Non-commodity content is the short name for a page that can answer yes to both.
Is non-commodity content an SEO thing or an AEO thing?
Both, because Google does not treat them as separate. The guide defines AEO (answer engine optimization) and GEO (generative engine optimization) and then says: "From Google Search's perspective, optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO." It explains that Google's AI features are "rooted in our core Search ranking and quality systems" and use those systems to retrieve pages from the Search index.
That has practical consequences. The same guide lists things you can ignore for Google Search:
- llms.txt and other "special" files. Google Search ignores them. Creating them will "neither harm nor help" your visibility in Google Search, though other services may use them.
- "Chunking" content. There is "no requirement to break your content into tiny pieces for AI to better understand it," and Google says there is no ideal page length.
- Rewriting content just for AI. You do not need a special writing style or every long-tail keyword variation.
- Inauthentic mentions. Seeking them "isn't as helpful as it might seem."
- Special schema. Structured data is not required for generative AI search, though it is still worth using for rich results.
So the work that improves a page for AI Overviews and AI Mode is the same work that improves it for classic results: make it more useful than the alternatives, and make sure Google can crawl and index it. To be shown in these features, a page must be indexed and eligible to appear with a snippet, and your site must be included under Settings > Search generative AI in Search Console, which is the default for every property.
What E-E-A-T does and does not mean here
E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. Three points from Google's people-first content page correct common myths:
- Trust is the most important part. Google writes: "Of these aspects, trust is most important. The others contribute to trust, but content doesn't necessarily have to demonstrate all of them." Experience is not ranked above the others.
- It is not a ranking factor or a score. Google says "E-E-A-T itself isn't a specific ranking factor." Its systems use a mix of factors that can identify content with good E-E-A-T, and they give "even more weight" to it on Your Money or Your Life topics such as health, finances and safety.
- Quality raters do not rank pages. Google says raters "have no control over how pages rank" and that rater data "is not used directly in our ranking algorithms."
Where E-E-A-T meets non-commodity content is in Google's "Who, How, and Why" questions. Who asks whether pages carry a byline that leads to real information about the author, and Google warns that fabricated author profiles are deception. How asks whether readers can see how the content was produced, such as how many products were tested and how. Why asks whether the page exists to help people or mainly to attract search visits. A non-commodity page usually answers all three in plain sight.
What makes a page non-commodity
Google's people-first page lists four attributes raters are trained to look at in a page's main content. Each one is a lever you can pull:
| Attribute (Google's wording) | What it means for a draft | Commodity version | Non-commodity version |
|---|---|---|---|
| Effort | Human work went into it. Google notes "Attribution or giving credit to other sources doesn't replace the need for original effort." | Rewrites the top five results | Runs a test, pulls your own numbers, interviews the person who did the work |
| Originality | Information or perspectives "that aren't already available on other websites" | Lists the same tips as everyone else | Shares what your team saw that others have not published |
| Talent or skill | Clear writing and the expertise needed to satisfy the reader | Generic advice with no judgment | Explains trade-offs and when the usual advice is wrong |
| Accuracy | Factually correct, and highly accurate on Your Money or Your Life topics | Unsourced claims and stale statistics | Dated sources and a clear line on what you could not verify |
In practice, most non-commodity content draws on one of five inputs your competitors do not have:
- First-hand results: what happened when you or a client did the thing, including what failed.
- Your own data: support tickets, CRM reports, survey answers, pricing tests, project time logs.
- A decision and its reasoning: why you chose option A over option B, like the homebuyer who waived the inspection.
- Process evidence: the steps, screenshots, settings and checks behind a recommendation.
- A defensible point of view: a stated opinion that experienced readers could disagree with.
Before and after: rewriting a commodity paragraph (hypothetical)
The example below is hypothetical. It shows the shape of the change, not a real company's results.
Before (commodity):
Reducing churn starts with a strong onboarding process. Make sure new customers understand your product, check in with them regularly, and ask for feedback. Great customer support also plays a key role in keeping customers happy.
Every sentence here is true, and every sentence could appear on any of a hundred pages. Nothing in it required experience to write.
After (non-commodity):
Imagine a 30-person software company that read every cancellation note from its last two quarters. The team found that most customers who left had never connected their email account during setup, and that the setup guide buried that step on page four. They moved it to the first screen, added a 10-minute call for any account that skipped it, and tracked the effect for a full quarter before deciding whether to keep the call. The lesson they wrote down: "onboarding" was too vague to fix. One missing step was not.
The second version names a source (cancellation notes), a finding, a specific change, how it was measured and a point of view. A reader cannot get that from a list of tips, and a model trained on existing pages could not produce it, because it did not exist before the team did the work. For a real post, replace the hypothetical details with your own numbers and say how you collected them.
How to audit your content for commodity pages
Use this checklist on your highest-traffic posts first.
- Pull the pages. In Search Console, export your top pages from the Performance report, and check the Generative AI performance report, which shows impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode.
- Read what already ranks. Search the main query for each page and note the points every result makes. Those points are the commodity layer.
- Run the swap test. Put a competitor's logo on your page. If nobody would notice, the page is commodity content.
- Ask Google's questions. Does it provide original information, research or analysis? Does it provide substantial value compared with other pages in results? Are you mainly summarizing what others have said without adding much value?
- Find your input. For each failing page, name one thing only your team has: a result, a data set, a decision, a process or an opinion. If you cannot name one, the page may not be worth keeping.
- Show the who and the how. Add a real author byline linked to a real bio, and a short note on how the content was produced. Never invent an author or credentials.
- Decide: improve, merge or retire. Improve pages where you have an input. Merge thin pages that cover the same question. Retire pages with no audience.
- Do not fake freshness. Google lists changing page dates "when the content has not substantially changed" as a warning sign. Update the date only when the content changes.
One caution while scaling up: Google's guide says creating separate content for every variation of how people might search, including AI fan-out queries, "primarily to manipulate rankings or generative AI responses" violates its scaled content abuse policy. That policy covers unoriginal content at scale "no matter how it's created," including generative AI pages that add no value. Fewer pages with real inputs beat many pages without them.
When commodity content is still fine
Not every page has to be a first-hand essay. A glossary entry, a product spec sheet or a setup guide for your own software can be commodity in style and still be the most useful page for your customers, because it is accurate and it is yours. Google's people-first test is whether the page would be useful to an audience that came "directly to you." The problem is publishing commodity content on topics where you have nothing to add, purely to chase search traffic.
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