After the May 2026 core update, I went looking at why traffic on one of my sites (Inspirational Guidance) had dropped. I went straight to the Google search console and looked through pages, what I saw shocked me because over 150 articles had been deindexed. When an article is deindexed Removed from search results entirely.
When an article has been deindexed it means it disappears from search so it won't show up in the search results when people are searching. If they have the direct link or they know the exact url and type that in then obviously they arrive at the article but it means that article is getting no clicks from search and at a time when getting clicks is already difficult that can really kill an independent site like mine.
Why Were They Deindexed?
When it comes to Inspirational Guidance I was using AI, mainly ChatGPT, to write articles back in 2025 when I thought it was ok to just copy and paste whatever I was given. After all, it tends to write better than what I can! Plus spell better too. Still, now in 2026 it seems this is not allowed. Reading back over some of the articles I get it, they were brief and not that great. AI Slop I believe its called now but many of them I thought were great.
Nothing about those articles was spam. Nothing was malicious or trying to game anything but it was exactly the pattern Google's update was built to catch.
What Actually Changed Wasn't the Content
The articles themselves hadn't changed at all. What changed was Google's tolerance for content that reads as generated rather than genuinely written, and that shift landed on a full year of pasted-in AI content all at once. Something that was fine in 2025 wasn't fine in 2026, and there was no warning attached to the change, no notice that the ground was moving. It just moved.
I've written elsewhere about the E-E-A-T upgrade behind this same update, and the pattern it's actually looking for: Future-Proof Your Digital Product Shop. What this deindexing added to that was the real cost of ignoring it, not the theory of it.
It is possible to come back from having articles deindexed and if it is your main site you will probably want to work hard towards making that happen. One thing Google AI told me is that it is better to have 20 articles that are worth reading than 150 mediocre ones, so I decided to embrace that and accept that articles that are indexed are worth reading and so therefore they are enough. If at some point I choose to go through the others ones I will but maybe I will just keep moving forward and write differently as I learn my lesson.
Why This Wasn't a Content Quality Problem
This is the part worth being precise about, because it's easy to hear "deindexed AI content" and assume the writing itself was poor. It wasn't badly written. It was generic in the specific way AI content defaults to when nobody's actually gone back through it: correct, readable, and interchangeable with something that could have been published on any similar site by anyone. Google's current update is built to find exactly that pattern and stop rewarding it, regardless of how clean the sentences are, plus they didn't really contain any of my own perspective or story.
Keep Your Own Creative Spirit in It
The actual lesson isn't don't use AI. AI drafting is genuinely useful, faster, and not going away, but the lesson is don't hand the whole thing over and walk away from it. Every piece needs something in it that only came from actually living the thing being written about, a real detail, an honest admission, a decision explained the way you'd actually explain it, not the generic version of the same advice. That's the difference between a draft and a finished piece, and it's the difference this deindexing made very concrete.
I've written up the actual habit that protects against this separately, in Use AI, Don't Just Accept It. Reading it back is the whole point. Skimming it and hitting publish is exactly what led to this.
What happens next
I really have no idea what to do about it. Rewrite them? Remove them. I have gone through and deleted many of them because if they don't exist what does it matter anyway. Now, I wait for Google to go to the site and decide what it thinks next. I have gone through some of them in batches. It is a lot of work when you work alone but the site is not a major priority for me right now. I may just decide its just not meant to be because every time I try to restart it something happens to knock it down. At some point I have to think that poor domain is just cursed lol
