The death of the category page?
1st October, 2024
Category pages have long been a focal point for SEOs and businesses alike, serving as the stable cornerstone of many websites. Strategically, they’ve been favoured for a few key reasons: they’re more dependable than individual product or service pages (which tend to come and go), they offer a better user experience for broad or comparative search terms, and they’re easier to optimise. Why bother creating unique, high-quality content for dozens or even hundreds of individual product pages when you can simply tinker with one category page?
This approach has led to a familiar, if problematic, scenario: category pages stuffed with a block of spammy, keyword-driven content. Whether it’s at the top or bottom of the page, this “content” rarely adds value for users and often disrupts the conversion funnel. It’s a stopgap solution, not a sustainable one.
Now, with the rise of AI content generation, businesses are doubling down on this strategy — but at scale. Instead of focusing on a handful of well-optimised category pages, they’re producing thousands of variations, targeting every conceivable segment, modifier, and long-tail keyword. The result? A bloated, content-heavy website that’s filled with more fluff than substance.
But here’s the problem: this strategy won’t work for much longer. As Google, Apple, and others advance their AI-driven, generative search results, they’ll start delivering more comprehensive, unbiased summaries of content across multiple sites. Why would Google rank or return your individual category page — no matter how perfectly tailored to a specific query — when it can generate a better, more holistic result using data from across the web?
The hard truth is, that category pages are becoming obsolete. Instead of competing with AI-generated summaries and rankings, businesses should focus on providing unique, in-depth value at the product or service level — something AI struggles to do in a personalised, context-driven way. The future of SEO isn’t about scaling low-value content. It’s about refining high-value experiences that AI can’t replicate.
