In recent days, Google has published two major updates in its Google Search Central, the portal that brings together key information, guidelines, and resources to help website owners optimize their sites and increase their visibility in Search. The first states that AI-generated content should not be published without prior review, while the second establishes that a website’s main content is one of the most important factors in assessing its quality.
The first update falls within Google Search’s guidelines on the use of AI-generated content on the web. The text added by Google emphasizes the importance of applying human review to content created with generative AI before publishing it as-is on your website, in order to prevent it from containing inaccuracies or false information. Fact-checking and relying on trustworthy sources remain essential.
“Please note that generative models do not retrieve data, but rather predict a likely sequence of words based on their training data. Because of this, generative AI outputs may contain inaccuracies (also known as hallucinations). It is essential to manually verify the truthfulness and reliability of all AI-generated content before publication,” the company explains.
In short, publishing AI-created content at scale without human curation will expose your website to losing your audience’s trust and suffering penalties from Google. And we definitely do not want that. So, marketers, you can use generative AI, but with good judgment.
The excerpt added by Google to its guide on creating helpful, reliable, people-first content reads as follows: “Beyond EEAT, the Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines highlight that one of the most important factors in assessing a page’s quality is the quality of its main content, specifically how effectively it enables the page to achieve its purpose and provide a satisfying user experience.”
In addition, the tech giant has also added a new section dedicated to explaining what “main content” is. According to Google’s definition, it is “any part of the webpage that directly helps the page achieve its purpose.” This includes everything from the main text, images, or audio and video files to interactive features (such as calculators, games, search tools, etc.), user-generated content (forum discussions, reviews, content uploaded by users), sections behind tabs or expandable menus, and the visible titles and headings themselves.
Finally, Google’s update also includes a list of the core aspects that quality raters (the human reviewers who assess the relevance and usefulness of search results) take into account when reviewing the quality of a website’s main content:
Google also reminds readers that: “Search evaluators have no control over the rankings that pages achieve in the results. The data they provide us is not used directly in our ranking algorithms, but rather helps us understand whether our systems are working properly, much like a restaurant benefits from customer feedback. This feedback helps us know whether our systems are functioning correctly.”
Google is using the start of fall to refresh its Search content guidelines while also actively reviewing website behavior with its latest spam update, launched last September 24.
This update to its ranking algorithm is designed to detect and limit the visibility of websites whose content is low-quality, copied, or based on poor SEO practices. The September spam update is expected to complete its rollout by the middle/end of this week. Once that happens, website owners will need to review how it has affected them and, if they have been penalized, address the practices that may have earned them Google’s punishment.
Photo: generated with ChatGPT Images 2.5
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