Google’s New Rule: Fact-Check Every Piece of AI Content

Most websites now use AI somewhere: a first draft, a product description, a batch of meta descriptions, the alt text for a hundred images. On 1 October 2026, Google quietly made its position on that much clearer.

The short version: AI-written content is still allowed. But Google now says, in plain words, that a person should check all of it before it goes live, including the small bits most people never look at. Here’s what changed, what didn’t, and a review routine that won’t slow your team down.

What Google changed on 1 October

Google updated its page on using generative AI content on your website. The documentation changelog describes it modestly, as bringing in “information from the Search Quality Raters guidelines” to keep the docs in sync with what Google presents at its developer events.

The most important addition is one sentence:

Google explains why in the same section: “generative models don’t retrieve facts, but predict a likely sequence of words.” In other words, AI writes what sounds right, which isn’t always what is right. Search Engine Roundtable, which spotted the change the day it happened, notes that the page had last been updated in October 2025.

It’s not just the article

Here’s the part that catches teams out. Google’s guidance says the review “also applies to metadata”: page titles, meta descriptions, structured data and image alt text. These are exactly the things people hand to AI in bulk, because nobody wants to write 300 meta descriptions by hand.

That makes sense when you think about where these appear. Your title and meta description are often the first thing a searcher reads. Alt text can show up in search too. And structured data feeds the extra details Google shows, like prices and ratings, so Google also asks you to validate the markup.

What hasn’t changed

It’s worth being clear, because headlines have made this sound bigger than it is. Google didn’t ban AI content, and it didn’t announce a new penalty or ranking update alongside the change.

Its position has been consistent since a February 2023 post, which said that “not all use of automation, including AI generation, is spam” and that its focus is on “the quality of content, rather than how content is produced.” The new guidance even suggests AI “can be particularly useful when researching a topic, and to add structure to original content.”

What Google does treat as spam is something different. Its spam policies list “using generative AI tools or other similar tools to generate many pages without adding value for users” as an example of scaled content abuse.

If you run an online store, read this part

Ecommerce has an extra rule that’s easy to miss. Google’s guidance says AI-generated product data such as titles and descriptions “must be specified separately and labeled as AI-generated.”

For Google Merchant Center, that means AI-written product titles go in a separate structured title attribute, marked as AI-generated. Google is direct about what happens otherwise: “If you don’t follow these requirements, we’ll disapprove your product.” AI-generated images also need a metadata tag that identifies them as AI-made.

A simple review routine

None of this requires a big new process. It needs one person, a short checklist and the habit of using it before anything is published.

1. Check every fact. Numbers, names, dates and quotes, each against a real source. AI states a wrong fact just as confidently as a right one.
2. Add what only you know. Your experience, your examples, your opinion. That’s what turns a generic draft into something worth ranking.
3. Read the title and meta description as a searcher. Are they accurate? Would you click? Do they promise what the page delivers?
4. Write alt text from the actual image. Describe what’s really there, not what the AI guessed from the file name.
5. Validate structured data with Google’s free Rich Results Test before you publish.

Google also suggests being open with readers about how content was made, in a way that suits your audience. A short line about how your team uses AI and reviews its work is enough for most business websites.

A worked example: reviewing an AI meta description

Here’s what the review looks like in practice. Imagine an AI tool writes this meta description for a plumbing company’s service page:

“Trusted 24/7 emergency plumbers in London with over 30 years of experience and guaranteed one-hour response times.”

It reads well. But a person checking it against the business finds three problems: the company covers one borough, not all of London; it was founded twelve years ago; and it promises a two-hour response, not one. Every one of those claims would appear in Google’s results under the company’s name.

The reviewed version is shorter and true: “Emergency plumbers in Hackney, available 24/7. Local team since 2014, with most call-outs reached within two hours.” That takes a minute to fix, and it’s the kind of mistake Google’s new guidance is aimed at.

Alt text fails the same way. An AI looking at a file named team-photo.jpg might write “Smiling team of engineers in a modern office”. If the photo actually shows two people fitting a boiler, that alt text helps nobody, including people who use screen readers.

How we review content at CreatoMark

We publish this kind of research every week, so we hold ourselves to the same rule. Before an article goes live, every figure is checked against its original source and linked where it’s used, every quote is copied from the source page rather than from someone else’s summary, and anything that’s our opinion is labelled as our opinion. Alt text is written by looking at the image, and titles and descriptions are read as a searcher would see them.

For client work the same habits apply, with one addition: the client signs off anything that makes a claim about their own business, such as years of experience, service areas or guarantees. Those are exactly the details an AI tool is most likely to get wrong, and the ones that matter most to customers.

What this means for agencies

If you deliver content or SEO for clients, this guidance is useful backing for something good agencies already do. “Every piece is fact-checked by a person before it’s published” is now Google’s own recommendation, not just a nice line in a proposal.

It’s also a good reason to look at the bulk work: the meta descriptions, alt text and product descriptions generated at scale. That’s where unreviewed AI output tends to hide. We wrote more about using AI to deliver faster without losing quality, and about how AI search is changing SEO.

The bottom line

Google hasn’t turned against AI. It has said, more clearly than before, that AI is a writing tool and not an editor. Use it to research and draft, then have a person check every fact, every title and every alt text before it reaches your readers or Google.

If you’d like help with that, our team handles content writing and SEO for agencies, with a person reviewing every piece. Book a call and we’ll talk it through.