Simon le Coz

The entire paper is basically an LLM book report on my August 2025 book, Strategic AI SEO, with a "GEO" sticker slapped on the cover. The irony being, I wrote that book to specifically call the process AI SEO and NOT GEO lol.

Google’s 2024 Content Warehouse leak lists an internal attribute called `contentEffort` inside page-quality data. The leaked description calls it an “LLM-based effort estimation for article pages.” Public Google Search Quality Rater Guidelines already instruct evaluators to judge main content by “the amount of effort, originality, and talent or skill” that went into it, and to give the lowest rating when nearly all the main content is auto- or AI-generated without manual oversight, curation, or added value. The leak supplies a plausible internal name for the signal the guidelines describe. No SEO knows the weight Google actually assigns it. The practical test is replication cost. A page that can be reproduced in minutes by scraping feeds, lightly rewriting existing results, or running an unedited prompt scores low. A page that requires proprietary data, original measurements, custom tools, first-hand reporting, or specialist judgment that is expensive to recreate scores high. AI assistance itself is neutral; the score depends on the uniqueness of the inputs and the human editing applied afterwards (HITL - Human in the Loop). High-effort pages are also harder for answer engines to ignore. Models synthesising an overview prefer sources that add information not already present in the consensus, so original data or analysis raises the chance of citation. The same standard applies whether the reader is a person or a system. References research and commentary by myself on @Hobo_Web and @trysearchable, with further independent researchers championing a closer look at Content Effort, including @CyrusShepard and @seosmarty. If you are an SEO nerd and want to find out more about Google's Content Effort score, or the contentEffort attribute found in the Google Content Warehouse API data leak, I have a roundup on X: