Google's March 2026 core update rewarded originator sources over aggregators and cracked down on low-value commodity content.
Nearly 80% of the top three results shifted, according to SE Ranking data reported by Search Engine Land.
SEO analysts tie the shift to what they call information gain. The company's own core update guidance does not name the signal.
Nick Fox, Google's senior vice president of knowledge and information, said the content that wins goes "one level deeper, two levels deeper" than AI summaries already provide.
Taken together, the old mantra "publish more to rank more" no longer holds. Years of chasing volume have left many organizations with a footprint that works against them.
David Malmborg, VP of Sales and Strategy at Boostability, sees teams chase volume this way regularly.
In this DesignRush interview, he breaks down where content strategies go wrong and what it takes to build visibility that compounds rather than collapses.
Who Is David Malmborg?
David Malmborg leads sales and strategy at Boostability, a white-label SEO firm that works with small businesses on long-term search visibility.
He has spent more than a decade helping companies adapt their organic strategies as search behavior shifts toward AI-driven discovery.
When More Content Becomes a Liability
Content expansion becomes a liability the exact moment an organization crosses the line from publishing proprietary insights to publishing commodity content.
“The tipping point occurs when you begin creating content simply to fill an editorial calendar or chase low-intent keyword volume that doesn't map to a real user journey,” Malmborg says.
“When you publish generic pages that rehash information already available across the web, you stop contributing to what Google calls ‘Information Gain.’”
A page without a unique data point, a distinct human-led perspective, or a real case study adds algorithmic noise that compounds with every new low-value page published.
Four Risks Organizations Miss
Content bloat creates structural risk well before it shows up in a traffic report. Malmborg identifies four causes that build up when content production outpaces quality control
1. De-centering the Topical Centroid
Every website has a mathematical and semantic center of gravity, which Malmborg calls the Topical Centroid.
Publishing on adjacent, shallow topics pulls it away from the brand's core expertise. Search crawlers lose clarity on what the site specializes in, and rankings drop accordingly
2. Disqualification From GEO and AEO Ecosystems
Generative Engine Optimization and Answer Engine Optimization models look for highly structured, authoritative, and concise data blocks to pull into AI Overviews and LLM citations.
Cluttering a digital footprint with superficial content makes it difficult for AI models to confidently parse and extract a brand as a single source of truth.
3. Crawl Budget Bleed
Search engines do not have infinite resources. They allocate crawl budget the same way any team allocates time.
Give them hundreds of weak pages and they burn through resources before reaching the ones that matter.
4. E-E-A-T Erosion
E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) erosion is what Malmborg says organizations overlook most.
"Publishing articles under generic 'Editorial Team' bylines or assigning topics to writers without verifiable real-world experience signals a lack of authentic, human-led expertise," he says.
"That's a primary target for Google's automated quality evaluators."
Of the four, it is the hardest to recover from. The others can be fixed structurally.
Trust signals take years to build and weeks to lose. A technical SEO audit often surfaces these patterns before quarterly reports do.
When Content Competes with Itself
Mass-producing pages that target subtle variations of the same topic ends up fragmenting a site's authority.
Instead of one definitive resource that answers a user's intent completely, organizations end up with five or ten shallow pages competing against each other.
"Think of your website's authority as a distinct semantic footprint in a vector space," Malmborg explains.
"To perform well in traditional search and be easily retrieved by generative engines, that footprint must be sharp, highly concentrated, and firmly anchored to your Topical Centroid."
That competition triggers keyword and intent cannibalization. Search engine algorithms get stuck trying to determine which URL represents the truest expression of the user's query.
When no single page carries enough authority, the algorithm frequently ranks none of them, choosing instead a competitor with a cleaner structure.
The brands that consolidated early are now capturing positions that fragmented competitors abandoned without realizing it.
The Pruning Mindset
A healthy, modern strategy requires a pivot from a production-scale mindset to one of informational density.
Malmborg grounds that shift in Boostability's Be Found Framework, whose sustainable approach rests on three pillars.
- Topical Centroid Alignment. Every new asset must reinforce the brand's core expertise, or it should not be published.
- Human-Led Architecture. Build content around proprietary data, internal case studies, and subject matter expert input, not AI-generated shortcuts.
- AEO and GEO Optimization. Formatting for machine readability means clean semantic HTML, structured schema markup, and front-loaded answers that AI systems can extract for direct responses.
AI can generate infinite surface-level copy. Search engines now reward what it cannot replicate, and that is proprietary data, hands-on experience, and firsthand expertise.
Pruning is part of that strategy. A healthy digital footprint requires regular curation, and that means consolidating, not just creating.
"One meticulously researched, expert-driven piece of content that fully satisfies user intent and provides net-new data will consistently outperform a dozen shallow, commodity articles," Malmborg says.
"Merging three thin, overlapping articles into one comprehensive, data-backed master pillar does more for your rankings than publishing ten new ones."
According to Malmborg, the Golden Rule for 2026 comes down to one test. Can a user or an LLM get the exact same answer from five other sites?
Can commodity content hurt? Sure, but context decides whether it's worth publishing.
