Google Wants You To Read What Your Robot Wrote. Titles Included. The Metadata Too.
Google's official guidance now explicitly states that AI-generated content must be fact-checked by hand before publishing. This manual review obligation extends to titles, alt text, and other metadata, not just body copy. The same guidance warns that using AI to produce many pages without adding user value may trigger Google's spam policy on scaled content abuse.
The underlying principle here is editorial accountability, which I should not have to explain but apparently do. The mechanism is gatekeeping. AI can draft, but a human must verify before publication. This teaches you that automation without verification is not a workflow. It is a liability.
Matt G. Southern, Senior News Writer at Search Engine Journal, reported on Google's updated guidance. The guidance originates from Google's own published content policies, which now frame unchecked AI output as a potential spam violation.
- Generate a piece of content with any consumer AI tool, such as ChatGPT or Gemini. You will receive a draft that may contain plausible but incorrect statements.
- Open the draft and manually verify every factual claim, every title, and every alt text description against a trusted source. This will take longer than generation. That is the point.
- Before publishing, ask yourself whether the page adds value beyond what already exists online. If it does not, do not publish it. You have just performed the review Google requires.