AI is saving you time creating content for your business. But is it your content? Google has revised its guidance on content quality, and it’s more explicit than before about what it’s looking for, including in pages written with AI’s help.
Key Takeaways
- Google revised its guidance on AI content, and what you add is what counts. Its raters look for effort, originality, talent or skill, and accuracy, so your experience and judgment are what make an AI-assisted page worth reading.
- AI text nobody oversees is low effort, by Google’s own definition. Give AI your experience to work with, like a recorded explanation of a recent job, and review what it produces before it goes live.
- A page for every town can count as spam. Pages that only swap the place name add little value for your ideal customers. Write about a location when you have something real to say about working there.
You can use AI to help draft and organize your content. What matters is what you add to it: your point of view, your knowledge of the work, your experience with customers, and the decisions you make that help them.
The Four Qualities Google’s Raters Look For
Google has spelled out four attributes its Search Quality raters are trained to evaluate: effort, originality, talent or skill, and accuracy. Raters don’t set rankings directly, but their feedback helps Google check whether its systems are showing the right content.
Originality is the one most people get stuck on. Google describes it as information or perspectives that aren’t already available on other websites. You can write about a topic plenty of others have covered. Originality comes from bringing your own experience, explanation, or useful information to it. We talked about bringing your point of view to your content in episode 455, and Google is now being more explicit about it.
Show What You Know From Doing the Work
You can ask AI for ten tips on choosing replacement windows and get a polished list. But if it’s the same advice someone can find on every other window company’s website, what’s the reason to choose you?
Think about a recent estimate instead. Maybe the customer wanted to replace every window, but you found some could be repaired. Explain what you looked for, why you recommended that approach, and what would have made replacement the better choice. That’s information from doing the work, and it helps someone who’s considering a similar decision understand the choices they may have and the questions you’ll help them answer.
Photos from the job can help, too. Show the condition you found and explain what it meant. That’s more useful than an image that could belong to any business offering the service.
Let AI Organize What You Already Know
Effort is where AI gets the most attention. Google’s revised guidance says that using generative AI to produce large amounts of text “without manual oversight or curation” represents little to no effort.
You probably don’t have hours to spend rewriting something just to prove you worked on it, and a useful process can save you time while still reflecting your expertise. The content can start with something easier than writing a whole page. Record yourself explaining a job, capture a question from an estimate, or have someone on your team describe a problem they solved. AI can help organize that into something clear, because you’ve given it something worth working with.
Skip the Page for Every Town
More pages won’t necessarily make your case stronger, either. Some tools will generate a service page for every town around you, changing the place name and a few sentences.
If those pages exist mainly to rank and add little value, they fit Google’s scaled content abuse policy, which names using AI tools to generate many pages without adding value for users. Pages aimed at specific cities that funnel visitors to the same place fall under a separate policy Google calls doorway abuse.
A page about working in a particular town can be useful when you have something relevant and unique to explain, such as local requirements or a project that illustrates the work there. Google’s September spam update has also put attention on this, though Google hasn’t said it targets AI content in general.
Check Every Page Before It Goes Live
A useful content process draws on what your business knows. You can share a few notes or talk through an example without writing every word yourself. The person preparing the content needs that input, and someone who understands the service should review whether the finished page is useful.
Accuracy is part of that review. Google’s guidance on AI-generated content calls manual fact-checking and review critical before publishing. That’s a basic publishing responsibility, alongside checking what the page actually adds.
Action Steps This Week
Three things to do this week:
- Choose one recent AI-assisted page and ask what it adds that someone couldn’t get from a dozen other websites.
- Improve it with one example, explanation, or recommendation from your actual work that helps a customer make a decision.
- Check your publishing process: make sure it includes your business’s expertise and a review by someone who knows the work, for both usefulness and accuracy.
Use the time AI saves you to bring more of your experience into your content. The questions you answer and the choices you help customers make give you plenty to work with, and they show someone how you’d approach their situation and why they might want to work with you.
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Links in this episode: Google: Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content
Google: Spam policies — scaled content abuse and doorway abuse
Search Engine Roundtable: September 2026 spam update observations
