,p>
Google updated its Search guidelines on Thursday to explain how to ensure the accuracy, authenticity and
trustworthiness prior to publishing generative AI content on websites.
All work must meet the standards of Search Essentials
and spam policies. Google wants brands, companies and others to manually fact-check and review before
publishing online.
Generative models do not retrieve facts, but predict a likely sequence of words based on their training data, Google explained in the post.
Based on this, generative
AI outputs may contain inaccuracies, which are also known as hallucinations.
advertisement
advertisement
AI is now a standard tool for writing brand copy. But fact-checking that copy matters far more than producing it
quickly, especially as the U.S. heads into the holiday season, with Halloween coming up at the end of this month.
The National Retail Federation 2026 forecast predicts
Halloween spending will top last year’s record of $13.1 billion -- about $115.14 per person.
Shoppers expect online content to be accurate, trustworthy and clear. That's why
marketers need to know how to spot scaled content abuse and low-effort, unoriginal content.
Google stressed that the guidelines aren't a playbook for ranking first in Google Search, AI
Overviews or its other products. Instead, its search raters use them to judge how well Google's search-ranking systems are
working.
The guidelines tell marketers to focus on accuracy, quality and relevance, especially when content is generated automatically. They also say to fact-check and review all AI-generated
content by hand before you publish it.
This review also applies to metadata like <title> elements, meta description elements, structured data and alternate texts for images, which can serve up in search results.
Giving users context also helps. Google encourages publishers to share how
their content was created to provide readers with more context. This could mean explaining how automation was utilized when using automatically generated content.
For ecommerce sites,
Google Merchant Center has policies for AI-generated content, Google explains.
For brands and companies that wanting to use AI to create product images, the image files must include a
hidden AI-generated label, for example.
Similarly, when using AI to write product titles and descriptions, the guidelines say companies cannot just paste them in normally. Instead, marketers
must use the platform's specific AI-labeling tools to flag them as AI-generated.
Prior, this document was last updated in October 2025.