you paid by the word for a year. google just told you what the words were worth.

merriam-webster made "slop" its 2025 word of the year, which is a cultural verdict and costs you nothing. the commercial verdict came from google's 2026 core updates, which went after scaled content abuse and took large chunks of organic traffic off sites publishing ai pages at volume, in some cases inside two weeks. the cost is not the writing subscription, it is a year of budget, headcount and calendar spent producing pages no person was going to read and no machine was going to rank. the fix being sold is a better prompt and a humanizer tool, which is the same factory with a fresh coat of paint on the sign.

do the version that holds: pull your last twelve months of published pages, sort them by organic traffic and by pipeline sourced, and count how many produced neither. then stop paying by the word and fund the four or five pieces only your company could have written, the ones with your numbers, your customers and your mistakes in them.