Useless content

Low-value content, in Yandex’s terms, is information that adds nothing for the reader and does not address their need. It is the broadest violation in the list and the one most likely to affect a site that has never knowingly broken a rule.

Three markers

• Copied or rewritten content. Fully or partially taken from elsewhere; several source pages merged into one; articles lifted from a dynamic source such as a news feed or search results; text reproduced with a few words swapped.
• Text that appears AI-generated or otherwise adds nothing. Yandex names the production methods — neural networks, machine translation, template insertion of keywords — and then, more usefully, the symptoms: drifting off topic, cycling through the same argument, sentences that inflate volume without adding anything, superficial reasoning derived from the page title, and invented or unverified facts presented as reliable.
• Automatically generated catalogues. Product or service listings assembled from other people’s data; category pages with no working filters or sorting; outdated or inaccurate listings.

What is explicitly not low-value

The exclusions prevent a lot of unnecessary panic. Original descriptions of products, services, events, organisations, software, instructions and manuals are fine. So are texts of books, songs, jokes and quotations; official documents, laws, standards and templates; press releases; and a site’s own text republished on other platforms such as social media.

The AI clause read carefully

Yandex does not prohibit generated text. It says such text is “original on paper” while offering little to the reader, and then judges it on the symptoms above. A generated draft that a knowledgeable person edited, corrected and grounded in verifiable facts does not display those symptoms. An unedited one displays all of them at once — which is why the volume of published AI text is not the risk, the absence of an editor is.

Yandex’s description of a good site

The positive list is short: it addresses the user’s need; it gives a reliable, credible, clear answer to the query; the content is original; the text is easy to read; navigation is straightforward and the site’s purpose is clear; and it appears trustworthy with traffic appropriate to its niche.

Practical remedy

Removal beats rewriting for copied text, and consolidation beats both for thin pages: twenty superficial articles on adjacent topics almost always make one page worth reading. For catalogues, the fix is functional rather than editorial — working filters, working sorting, accurate stock and prices.