Google’s guidance on generative AI content now sits on a page marked as last updated October 1, 2026, and it asks publishers to fact-check AI output by hand before it goes live.
The page in Google Search Central says: “It is critical to manually factcheck and review all AI-generated content for accuracy and trustworthiness before publishing.” Google gives the reason: generative models do not retrieve facts, they predict a likely sequence of words from training data, so outputs may contain inaccuracies, also called hallucinations.
The same review applies to metadata that can appear in Search results: title elements, meta description elements, structured data and the alternate text of images.
The page repeats that using generative AI tools to produce many pages without adding value for users may violate Google’s spam policy on scaled content abuse. It points to sections 4.6.5 and 4.6.6 of the Search Quality Raters guidelines, which cover scaled content abuse and main content made with little effort, originality or added value. Google notes that those guidelines are not a guide to ranking first, and that raters’ ratings do not directly influence ranking.
Why it matters
Google also recommends sharing how content was created, for example background on how automation was used and image metadata. For ecommerce, it says Merchant Center policies require AI-generated images to carry the IPTC DigitalSourceType value TrainedAlgorithmicMedia, and AI-generated product titles and descriptions to be specified separately and labeled as AI-generated.
Our read
Titles, descriptions and alt text are easy to generate in bulk. Google’s text puts them in the same review step as the article body, so a workflow that proofs the body and ships the metadata unchecked skips what the guidance names. For related context, see our reports on a federal bill on AI crawler disclosure and on AI search budgets.
Source: Google Search Central
