Audit Commodity Content Checklist
How to Audit Your Website for Commodity Content
A step-by-step checklist to find out how much of your content Google no longer needs to send clicks for — and how to fix it.
You've published 50+ posts this year. Maybe 100. But how many of them could a competitor produce by following the exact same brief?
If you read our breakdown of commodity vs. non-commodity content, you already know why this matters — Google isn't penalizing commodity content, it's just quietly stopped rewarding it. AI Overviews answer the generic stuff directly in the SERP, and your click never happens.
What most site owners don't have is a way to actually find out how much of their existing content falls into that trap. Not a theory. A number.
This is the audit we run for clients before touching a single new brief. It takes under an hour for most small-to-midsize sites, and you don't need any tools beyond Google Search Console and a spreadsheet.
Pull Your Content Inventory
Start with a full list of every published URL on your blog or resource section.
- Export it from Google Search Console (Performance → Pages) or crawl your site with Screaming Frog
- For each URL, pull: organic clicks (last 3–6 months), impressions, backlinks, and publish date
This is your raw list. Don't judge anything yet — just get it into one spreadsheet.
Run the Competitor Replication Test
This is the single question that does most of the work:
Go through your list and answer yes or no for each piece. Be honest — this isn't about how well it's written, it's about whether the information is unique to you.
Anything you flag "yes" goes in your commodity bucket. Don't delete anything yet — just tag it.
Check for Experience Signals
For the pieces you're unsure about, score them against a short checklist. Give one point for each that applies:
- Original data, testing, or research you conducted yourself
- First-hand examples, specific numbers, or named case studies
- A named author with real, verifiable expertise in the topic
- Unique images, screenshots, or documentation nobody else has
- A perspective or conclusion that isn't the "safe consensus" answer
Commodity
Borderline — salvageable
Non-commodity — protect it
Cross-Reference with Performance Data
Now overlay the data you pulled in Step 1. This is where the pattern becomes impossible to ignore.
Commodity content almost always shows the same signature: low or declining impressions, near-zero backlinks, and clicks that have been sliding since AI Overviews rolled out for that query type. Non-commodity pieces tend to hold steady or grow, even without much promotion, because they keep earning links and return visits on their own.
Run your top queries through our AI Overview Checker. If a query triggers an AI Overview, that's a strong signal the underlying content is commodity — Google doesn't need to send a click for information it can already summarize itself.
Bucket Every Piece
Once you've scored everything, sort your inventory into three buckets:
Keep & enhance
Borderline pieces with real potential. Add original data, a specific example, an expert quote, or a testing component. Often a 2–3 hour edit is enough to move a page from commodity to non-commodity.
Consolidate
You'll usually find 3–5 thin, overlapping posts targeting near-identical queries. Merge them into one authoritative resource instead of leaving them to compete with each other.
Deprioritize or redirect
Low-value commodity pages with no backlinks and no traffic. Either 301-redirect them into a stronger related page, or leave them as-is but stop investing in them.
Fix the Briefing Process, Not Just the Content
An audit fixes what already exists. It doesn't stop the problem from repeating.
The real fix happens before anything gets written. If your content briefs start with "write 1,500 words on X keyword," you'll keep producing commodity content no matter how good your writers are. Briefs need to start with a person, not a keyword:
- Who on your team has actually done this, tested this, or seen this go wrong?
- What do they know that isn't already published somewhere else?
- What would a competitor not be able to say, even with the same brief?
That shift — from keyword-first briefs to expertise-first briefs — is what actually prevents next quarter's audit from looking the same as this one.
Quick Reference: The 6-Step Audit
- Pull your full content inventory with performance data
- Run the competitor replication test on every piece
- Score remaining pieces on experience signals
- Cross-reference scores with clicks, impressions, and backlinks
- Bucket into keep & enhance / consolidate / deprioritize
- Fix the briefing process so new content doesn't repeat the pattern
What to Do With Your Results
If most of your content lands in the commodity bucket, you're not alone — it's the default outcome of keyword-first content calendars, and it's exactly what we walked through in our original piece on this topic.
The fix isn't publishing less. It's publishing fewer things that could be written by anyone, and more things that could only be written by you.
CredoRank
We run this exact audit for clients before building their content strategy — so every piece has a reason to rank.
