Every so often, something surfaces from Google’s black box of algorithms that makes SEOs sit up straight. The recent Google leak did exactly that — and tucked away inside it was one particularly revealing signal: contentEffort.

It’s a machine-learning metric that attempts to quantify how much genuine human effort went into creating a page. In other words, Google is literally measuring how hard you worked on your content.

What does “content effort” actually mean?

At its core, this signal tries to assess how easy (or hard) your content would be to replicate.

If your article is generic, templated, or could plausibly have been produced by ChatGPT in 30 seconds, it’s likely to score low on contentEffort.
But if your content includes:

• Original insights and opinions
• Data or case studies drawn from your own work
• Expert quotes or interviews
• Unique examples that demonstrate real experience

…then Google interprets that as “high effort”, and, in turn, more helpful and trustworthy.

Why this matters

The concept of content effort feels like the missing piece in Google’s Helpful Content System. It’s a way for Google to distinguish between pages that add real value and those that simply summarise what’s already out there.

That might also explain why so many sites – especially those publishing thin, AI-driven, or low-originality content – have struggled with recent updates.

What this means for writers and marketers

If you create content for SEO, this is a useful mental shift.
Forget chasing word counts or keyword density for a moment. Instead, ask:

“How hard would it be for someone else – human or AI – to copy this page?”

That’s a powerful proxy for quality.

Recommended reading

For a deeper dive into this topic, Shaun Anderson at Hobo Web has written an excellent breakdown of the contentEffort signal and what it could mean for on-page SEO. It’s well worth your time.