Question 1

How do you recognize it?

Accepted Answer

Indexed page count climbs into the thousands while organic sessions stay flat or decline after week six. Search Console shows impressions with near-zero click-through on templated pages, clustered around one query pattern. Client asks why the sitemap grew 40x but the retainer report shows no lift in qualified traffic. Pages rank briefly on page three or four, then drop out entirely within two crawl cycles. Content review finds 80 percent of pages differ only by city name or product SKU, with identical body paragraphs.

Question 2

Why does it happen?

Accepted Answer

Templates are fed generic model output instead of proprietary inputs (pricing, inventory, review counts, local licensing), so every page is a near-duplicate of its siblings. Volume is treated as the deliverable: agencies ship page count to hit a milestone and never build the structured data layer that would make each URL distinct. No measurement loop ties published pages to query-level performance, so dead templates keep generating for months before anyone checks. Model and prompt choices are made once at kickoff and never revisited, even as cheaper or stronger models change the cost-per-page math.

Question 3

How do you fix it?

Accepted Answer

Pull the 50 lowest-performing templates from Search Console, kill or consolidate them, and redirect to the strongest surviving URL in each cluster. Inject at least one data field per page that cannot be generated from the prompt alone: live price, stock status, review count, or permit number. Set a publish gate requiring a human to approve the first 20 pages of any new template before the remaining batch goes live. Add a monthly query-level report to the client retainer showing impressions, clicks, and conversion by template family, not by total page count.

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