What Is AI Slop and How to Keep It Off Your Blog
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AI slop is low-quality digital content produced in volume with generative AI, with little regard for whether it's accurate, relevant, or wanted by anyone. Merriam-Webster made "slop" its 2025 word of the year, defining it as digital content of low quality produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence (Merriam-Webster, December 2025). The word describes a level of care, not a production method. Here's the test that separates the two.
What Is AI Slop?
AI slop is content, text, images, video, or audio, made with generative AI and released with little regard for whether it's accurate or wanted.
The word does the explaining: 18th-century slop meant soft mud, by the 19th, food waste poured into a trough for pigs, then more broadly "a product of little or no value" (Merriam-Webster, December 2025). Applied to AI output, it says exactly what it means: material released without anyone checking what lands in the trough.
AI slop isn't a format: text, images, video, and audio all qualify. It's a judgment call, not a technical category; no tool measures it directly.
What Does AI Slop Actually Look Like?
AI slop is recognized by what's missing, no fact-checking, no relevance, no human editing pass, not by a single visual tell like a watermark.
You already know the image giveaways, extra fingers, warped text, and plenty of sites cover them. Your blog's problem is text, where almost nobody looks.
The clearest signals come from Wikipedia's own criteria for deleting AI-generated pages on sight: text still talking to the reader mid-conversation, and references that don't hold up, dead links, mismatched metadata (Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org). Research agrees: text lacking relevance or containing factual errors gets labeled slop across domains (Northeastern University, Khoury College, December 2025).
A listicle is a common place for this to slip in; see our notes on writing a listicle that earns its place.
Is All AI-Generated Content Slop?
No, and the arithmetic makes the point. About half of new articles published online are already mostly AI-written, a share that's held steady for over a year: 35.9% within a year of ChatGPT's release, about 48% at two years, near half since early 2025, from an analysis of 55,400 English-language pages sampled from Common Crawl, published between January 2020 and March 2026 (Axios, May 2026). If "made with AI" were the test, half the web would be slop by definition, which tells you nothing.
Google has said as much directly: its focus is on "the quality of content, rather than how content is produced" (Google Search Central, developers.google.com). It made the same case about humans a decade earlier: no one thought it reasonable to ban all human-generated content over fears about mass production (Google Search Central, developers.google.com).
The curl project shows why. In 2025, about 20% of its security submissions were AI-generated slop, and confirmed vulnerabilities collapsed from north of 15% to below 5% (the curl project's maintainer, July 2025); the bug bounty was killed in January 2026 after paying out over $100,000 across 87 confirmed cases. That same year, a researcher using AI-assisted scanning tools merged roughly 50 fixes into the same codebase; the maintainer called the findings "Actually truly awesome" and said "Powerful tools in the hand of a clever human is certainly a good combination" (The Register, October 2025). The difference was never the tool.
We should be direct here: MentionLab writes SEO blog posts with AI agents, and the AI Overview for this exact search names that kind of content as textbook slop. The critique is fair when content exists to fill a ranking slot rather than answer a real question. See whether AI content is good for SEO.
This article, Blue could have written it for you: content optimized for Google + AI, without you writing a single word.
Try mentionLABHow Can You Tell Slop From Useful AI Content?
Ask four questions about a draft before publishing, the same ones Google, Wikipedia, and independent researchers already use to sort slop at scale.
Why it exists. Google defines the failure mode plainly: "Scaled content abuse is when many pages are generated for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings and not helping users" (Google Search Central, developers.google.com). Its guidance comes down to intent, not tooling: use AI to help produce something "helpful and original," not as "an inexpensive, easy way to game search engine rankings" (Google Search Central, developers.google.com).
Its numbers. Factuality is one of the strongest, most consistent predictors of slop in the research (Northeastern University, Khoury College, December 2025). A number you can't trace to a named, dated source is a slop number.
Its references. Wikipedia never asks whether AI wrote a page. It asks whether anything in it is real, and deletes on sight when links go dead or citation metadata doesn't match (Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org).
Its review. The deletion criterion is literally named "LLM-generated pages without human review," targeting content that "would have been removed by any reasonable human review" (Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org). The test was never "did a machine write this." It's "would a serious human review have caught it," exactly what curl's maintainer concluded from the other side.
| What you check | Slop | Useful AI-assisted content |
|---|---|---|
| Why it exists | Made to fill a slot and chase a ranking | Made to answer a question someone actually asked |
| Its numbers | Untraceable, or simply wrong | Every figure tied to a named source and a date |
| Its references | Links and citations that lead nowhere | Citations that resolve and say what the text claims |
| Its review | Published exactly as generated | Read by a human who could have killed it |
| Its substance | Repeats what already ranks | Says at least one thing the ranked pages do not |
See where ChatGPT gets its information and the trust signals Google looks for for more.
How Do You Keep AI Slop Off Your Blog?
Decide what the page needs to say before anything writes it, trace every number to a named, dated source, and make sure a human who could have killed it actually read it first.
Check that every link resolves and says what you're claiming; a dead or unrelated citation is the same tell that gets AI pages removed on sight elsewhere.
Say something the ranked pages don't already say, or the draft has no reason to exist. Publish under a real name: Google recommends accurate bylines "when readers would reasonably expect it," and notes giving AI the byline "is probably not the best way" to disclose how content was made (Google Search Central, developers.google.com); see editing an AI draft before it goes live.
Don't confuse volume with value, that's the scaled content abuse Google's policy targets; see scaling content production without turning it into filler and writing FAQs that answer a real question.
This is close to how we operate at MentionLab: our agents calibrate each post against the pages already ranking, verify every number at its source, and run a 20-point quality check before human review. See getting cited by AI answer engines.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is an example of AI slop?
Often it's references that lead nowhere, dead links or citations that don't check out. It can also be a news post rewritten with nothing added, or a video made purely to get views. What ties these together is a lack of verification.
Why do people call everything AI slop?
Because the word is a judgment, not a detector. Merriam-Webster's word of the year defines slop as low-quality content produced usually in quantity by AI (Merriam-Webster, December 2025), a definition about quality, not AI itself. Once a term becomes an insult, it spreads to anything that looks machine-made.
Does AI slop make money?
Yes, and that's exactly why it exists. Platforms pay for engagement and views, generating content costs almost nothing, so even very low-value attention still turns a profit. That gap drives the volume, not the technology. There's no verified figure for how much money AI slop generates industry-wide.
Is AI slop bad?
For the reader, yes: it takes up space something useful could have filled. For anyone publishing, it's worse than unhelpful. Content built to occupy a ranking slot rather than help a real reader is precisely what Google's spam policy calls scaled content abuse (Google Search Central, developers.google.com).
What is AI slop in coding?
Same idea, different field: AI-generated code or bug reports that look plausible but waste a maintainer's time. In 2025, curl saw about 20% of its security submissions turn into AI-generated slop, and shut down its bug bounty in January 2026 after paying out more than $100,000 (the curl project's maintainer, January 2026). The test is the same: did anyone check first?
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