Google made the death of the "SEO intro" official

For a decade, the industry wrote four paragraphs of generic context before answering any question — because “long content ranks.” The 2025 Search Quality Rater Guidelines gave that a name: filler. And its own section: 5.2.2.

Google’s definition: low-effort content that inflates the page and occupies its most valuable space without serving the purpose. The canonical example is the recipe page demanding three screens of scrolling — family backstory, generic facts about the ingredients — before the recipe. The instruction to raters is blunt: the most helpful content belongs at the top; voluminous or prominent filler that makes the helpful content hard to find justifies a Low rating.

The practical consequence inverts the template most people still use:

1. Answer first. What the user came for, visible without scrolling.
2. Depth after. Context, nuance and elaboration have value — below the answer, not in front of it.
3. Padding never. If a paragraph exists to “add volume,” it now carries a cost, not a benefit.

The audit test fits in one question: is what the user came for visible without scrolling? If not, you have a problem with a name, a section and a score in the manual that trains the algorithm.

The full analysis of the section lives in the annotated guide: Low: quality purgatory.