Our clients have been looking to us more and more for guidance on using AI to help write their website content. And we get it. Hiring content writers can be very time-consuming and expensive. Timelines stretch. Budget dwindles. The back and forth in changes alone can cost precious days you don’t have. Throw a prompt into ChatGPT and in three minutes you have a finished page, right?
But the news earlier this month makes us double down on why we continue to push back on generic and AI-generated copy, and will always recommend adding a genuine human into the copywriting mix. If you want your website to rank for search, the need for content to be helpful and relatable to your audience is only surpassed by its need to be factually accurate, which is something that we all know AI cannot guarantee.
On October 1, 2026, Search Engine Land’s Barry Schwartz reported that Google made major updates to its Search help documentation and noted the updates to how its Search Quality raters evaluate the quality of a web page’s main content. As it’s been a long while since Google updated these guidelines and used the word “critical” several times in the documents, the SEO community stood up and took notice.
TL;DR: Google said it’s “critical” to manually review and factcheck all AI-generated content before publishing the content to your website, to ensure accuracy and trustworthiness.
From Google’s help document updates:
- “When creating content for the web, focus on accuracy, quality, and relevance, especially when automatically generating the content. Keep in mind that generative models don’t retrieve facts, but 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 critical to manually factcheck and review all AI-generated content for accuracy and trustworthiness before publishing.”
To be clear, Google isn’t telling anyone to stop using AI. It’s telling you not to publish what AI writes until a person has checked it.
Additional updates stated, “Beyond E-E-A-T [experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness], the Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines emphasize that one of the most critical factors for assessing page quality is the quality of the main content, specifically how effectively it allows the page to achieve its purpose and provide a satisfying user experience.”
TL;DR: Search Quality raters evaluate fundamental attributes of the main content including emphasis on human traits like talent and skill, originality, accuracy, and effort.
Search Quality raters are trained to evaluate:
- Effort: The extent to which human work went into creating the content or the systems powering it. For example, writing original analysis, translating a poem manually, or building a custom interactive map for a game represents high effort. Conversely, automatically generating pages from feeds or using generative AI to produce large amounts of text without manual oversight or curation represents little to no effort. Attribution or giving credit to other sources doesn’t replace the need for original effort.
- Originality: The extent to which the content offers unique, original information or perspectives that aren’t already available on other websites.
- Talent or skill: Whether the content shows the talent, skill, or expertise necessary to provide a satisfying experience for visitors (such as clear writing, well-produced video, or functional page tools). Keep in mind that not all content requires specialized expertise. For example, a person sharing their experience about finding a new way to clear their driveway of snow generally doesn’t necessarily require specialized expertise.
- Accuracy: For informational pages, the content should be factually accurate. For topics that could significantly impact people’s lives or well-being (YMYL topics), the content must be highly accurate and consistent with established expert consensus.
It’s not lost on us that there have been four confirmed Google spam updates so far this year, and this last one in September took weeks instead of days. Google keeps tightening how it treats low-quality content, and this time it has spelled out in writing what it expects from AI-assisted pages.
The changes to the Search documentation are the guidance that we’ve been waiting for. Unreviewed AI content is low-effort, and low effort content is what Search Quality raters are trained to rate poorly. The fix is not to abandon AI. It’s to work with AI to make sure you’re producing quality content, checked and proofread by a real person, before every page goes live.
Not sure if your content is missing a human touch?
If you have AI-generated content on your site and you’re not sure where you stand, 3Block Digital can audit your existing pages and show you where a human touch is needed most.
