More content is not a strategy
Publishing more is the default answer to almost every SEO problem, and it is the right answer to very few of them. Here is how to tell which one you have.
Almost every SEO conversation ends in the same place: we should publish more. It is an easy conclusion because it is always available. You can always write another post, and nobody has to admit anything is wrong with the ones already there.
It is also the answer to a fairly narrow problem, and most sites do not have that problem.
What “publish more” actually fixes
Volume is the right answer when the gap is coverage: people are searching for things you have simply never written about. That is real, it happens, and the fix is exactly what it sounds like.
It is the wrong answer when the gap is anything else. Three of those are much more common:
- Your pages are not being kept. If Google fetches a page and declines to store it, a second page of the same kind gets the same verdict. That is a content-quality judgement wearing a technical status, and I wrote about how to tell which of those you have.
- Your pages compete with each other. Two posts on one topic usually means one gets kept and the other becomes a duplicate. Adding a third does not break the tie, it widens it.
- Nobody wants the thing you rank for. Traffic that never converts is not a traffic problem, and more of it makes the numbers look better while the business does not move.
Google now has its own word for the kind of page volume tends to produce, in the guide it published for generative AI features: commodity content. Its example is “7 Tips for First-Time Homebuyers”, and the description is unkind and accurate: content “based on common knowledge, which could originate from anyone”. Volume is very good at producing exactly that, because common knowledge is the cheapest thing to write.
Why the default is so sticky
Publishing is measurable, immediate and blameless. You can point at it in a weekly update. Deciding that eleven existing posts should become four is none of those things: it takes judgement, it looks like going backwards, and someone has to say the eleven were a mistake.
So the incentive runs toward volume regardless of whether volume is the constraint, and the pile grows until the pile itself is the problem.
A blunter way to decide
Before writing anything new, ask what happened to the last ten things you published. Not how they rank, that comes later. Just: were they kept, are they cannibalising each other, and did anyone who arrived do anything.
If the answer is “we do not know”, that is the work. If the answer is “they were kept and they earned something”, then yes, write more. The question is not whether content works. It is whether you have evidence that yours is currently the binding constraint.
Frequently asked questions
So should I stop publishing?
No. Volume is the right answer to a coverage gap: people search for something you have genuinely never written about. The argument here is only that coverage is one of four possible gaps, and it is not the most common one. Find out which one you have first.
How do I know whether my pages are being kept?
The page indexing report in Search Console tells you directly, per URL. A page at “crawled - currently not indexed” was fetched and declined, which is a verdict on the content rather than a technical fault. That distinction is the whole subject of being crawled is not being indexed.
Is consolidating two posts into one safe?
Safer than leaving them competing, usually. Google chooses one canonical among pages it considers duplicates, and a declared canonical is a strong signal rather than a directive, so leaving the choice to Google means leaving it unmade. Redirect the weaker URL to the one you want kept instead of deleting it.
Does more content help with AI Overviews and AI Mode?
Not as such. Google's position is that optimizing for generative AI search “is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO”, and the same guide contrasts first-hand perspective against summaries of what already exists. Volume of the second kind is what the term commodity content was coined for.
What if I have no data at all yet?
Then the data is the work, and it is a week of it, not a quarter. Which of the last ten posts were kept, which pairs target the same query, and whether anyone who arrived did anything. Publishing more before you know is a decision to keep not knowing.
Sources
- Google's guide to optimizing for generative AI features — commodity content, and first-hand perspective versus restated content
- How to specify a canonical URL with rel="canonical" and other methods — how Google chooses among duplicates, and why a canonical is a signal
- Page indexing report — where to see whether a page was kept
- Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content — the self-assessment questions, including the ones about volume