Avoid keyword stuffing / SEO-filler
Traditional keyword stuffing does not improve, and can reduce, visibility in generative engine answers.
Best study is at least large-n observational or controlled, with some replication. Outcome data is still mostly correlational.
Supported as advice: a lab test found stuffing did not help, and Google's spam policies prohibit it. The free check's density threshold is our heuristic — no engine publishes one.
How to fix
Write naturally: repeating a keyword doesn't help, and Google treats heavy repetition as spam. The free check flags a page when one word is more than 8% of its content words (pages of 150+ words), our own rule of thumb.
- Find the flagged word in the row details.
- Read the page aloud and rewrite sentences where it sounds forced.
- Swap in pronouns or plain alternatives ("it", "your team") where the word adds nothing.
- Cut keyword lists, repeated city or service lists, and footers stuffed with search terms.
- Keep your buyers' words where they matter: the title, a heading and the answer.
How to check it worked: run the free check again. The "Reads naturally" row should pass: "No word is repeated unnaturally."
What the free check looks for
- Read the page aloud; rewrite anything that repeats a phrase unnaturally.
- The free check warns when one non-stopword, non-brand word is over 8% of a 150+ word page — a loose heuristic, not a standard.
Caveats
- — Correlational studies dominate this field. AI citations churn: a small 15-prompt preprint (arXiv 2609.22655; the author sells AI-visibility tooling) saw each engine's cited URL set change by about 67% on average from one day to the next, with under 1% URL overlap across engines. Toronto (2610.15033) found only about 40% of the within-site pattern of ChatGPT citations still held two weeks later, and 14% after ten weeks. Re-verify yearly.
- — Included in the free page check.
Studies and docs
2024
GEO-bench lab test (GPT-3.5 engine reading five fixed Google results): keyword stuffing did not beat the unedited baseline and did worse on Perplexity. The ~40% lift is for citations, quotations and statistics on position-adjusted word count, not a ChatGPT citation rate.
2026
Defines keyword stuffing as filling a page with keywords or numbers to manipulate rankings, e.g. repeating words or phrases so often it sounds unnatural. No numeric threshold.
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