What AI slop and workslop cost content and product teams

Content that nobody finds

Ahrefs checked about 14 billion pages: 96.55% get no visits from Google, and another 1.94% get 1 to 10 a month (Ahrefs, 2023).

Generated articles do worse. In May 2026 Graphite classed about 50% of new English-language articles as mostly generated, yet only 14% of the articles ranking in Google Search are, and those rank lower (Graphite, 2025 and 2026).

Tasks that eat the week

Atlassian surveyed 3,500 developers and managers in 6 countries: 50% of developers lose more than 10 hours a week to organisational inefficiencies, and finding information tops the list of causes (Atlassian, 2025).

Even real bugs come with gaps. Of 180 reproducible Android bug reports from GitHub, 92.2% missed at least 1 step, and 54 gave no device or version details (Johnson et al., 2022).

What AI slop is

In May 2024 Simon Willison used “slop” for generated content that is mindlessly made and pushed on people who did not ask for it (Willison, 2024). Merriam-Webster made “slop” its word of the year for 2025: low-quality digital content, usually produced in quantity by means of AI.

For Slopcheck, slop is any part of a text that answers none of its reader’s questions, whoever wrote it. That covers openers, promises that fit any product, facts the reader already knows and repeats. A product page that spends 60 of its 300 words on them is 20% slop. A generator writes “seamless experience” in a second; a person in a hurry writes “as discussed, fix ASAP” just as fast.

Why it got worse after 2022

12 months after ChatGPT launched in November 2022, 36% of new articles were mostly generated; after 24 months, 48% (Graphite, 2026). In April 2025, 74.2% of 900,000 new web pages contained generated text (Ahrefs, 2025).

A manager can now generate a task in seconds. In the workslop study, people who received AI-generated work that lacked substance said each case took about 2 hours to deal with (BetterUp Labs and Stanford Social Media Lab, 2025).

Slop and Google: what happens to a site

In March 2024 Google added the scaled content abuse policy: many pages made to manipulate rankings, with little to no value for users, no matter how they are created. It also released a core update; on 26 April it reported that this update, together with its earlier work, had left 45% less low-quality, unoriginal content in results (Google, 2024).

In March 2024 Originality.ai checked about 79,000 sites on the Mediavine, Raptive and Ezoic ad networks: 1,446 had dropped out of Google’s index, which Originality.ai counted as manual actions, with an estimated loss of over 20 million visitors a month (Originality.ai, 2024).

In 2026 OtterlyAI put about 2,000 generated posts on 2 new sites. One collapsed in Google after about 2 weeks; the other peaked at about 21,700 Google impressions a week in mid-May and was down to 9 impressions a day by 27 June. Search Console showed no manual action on either site (OtterlyAI, 2026).

Workslop: what happens to a team

In a survey of 1,150 full-time US desk workers, 40% had received workslop, AI-generated work that looks finished but lacks substance, in the past month. They put each case at about 2 hours to handle; the researchers estimate the cost at $186 a month per affected employee, or over $9 million a year for a company of 10,000. About half of respondents saw the senders as less creative, capable and reliable (BetterUp Labs and Stanford Social Media Lab, 2025).

In the 2025 Stack Overflow survey, the most common frustration with AI tools was “AI solutions that are almost right, but not quite”, cited by 66% of developers (Stack Overflow, 2025).

What Slopcheck does

Slopcheck gives a text 2 numbers in under a second. Information gain is the share of the reader’s questions the text answers; slop is the share of words that answer none, marked sentence by sentence. Content teams check an article or a product page before it goes live; product teams check a task or a bug report before it goes into a sprint. Every section of this page has at least 75% information gain and under 15% slop: paste any of them into the check on the home page.

Sources

1. T. Soulo (2023). 96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Ahrefs
2. Atlassian (2025). State of Teams 2025
3. Graphite (2026). AI Now Writes as Many Online Articles as Humans
4. Graphite (2025). How Does AI-Generated Content Perform in Search and Answer Engines?
5. Atlassian (2025). State of Developer Experience Report 2025
6. J. Johnson et al. (2022). An Empirical Investigation into the Reproduction of Bug Reports for Android Apps. SANER 2022, section IV-C
7. S. Willison (2024). Slop is the new name for unwanted AI-generated content
8. Merriam-Webster (2025). Word of the Year 2025: slop
9. R. Law (2025). 74% of New Webpages Include AI Content (Study of 900k Pages). Ahrefs
10. Google Search Central (2024). What web creators should know about our March 2024 core update and new spam policies
11. E. Tucker (2024). New ways we’re tackling spammy, low-quality content on Search. Google
12. Originality.ai (2024). Can Google Detect and Does it Penalize AI Content
13. P. Tarrayo (2026). The 2,000 AI Blogs Experiment: Does Google Penalize AI Content? OtterlyAI
14. K. Niederhoffer et al. (2025). AI-Generated “Workslop” Is Destroying Productivity. Harvard Business Review
15. BetterUp Labs, Stanford Social Media Lab (2025). Workslop
16. Stack Overflow (2025). 2025 Developer Survey: AI