Short answer: Google now spells out, in its own help documentation, four things its Search Quality raters are trained to look for in the main content of a page, effort, originality, talent or skill, and accuracy, and it did so within weeks of a spam update and a Google speaker’s warning that scaled content is becoming a bigger problem than link spam. For a local service business, that is a direct message about the pages you publish for every town you serve.
If you run a roofing company, an HVAC shop, a dental practice, a lawn care crew, or a restaurant in Northeast Indiana, you probably have a page like “Plumber in Auburn,” “Plumber in Kendallville,” “Plumber in Angola.” Maybe you wrote them. Maybe an agency did. Maybe a tool generated them in an afternoon. Google’s documentation does not care which, but it does care whether anyone put real work, real knowledge, and real facts into them.
This post walks through what Google actually wrote, what its people said at Search Central Live in Barcelona, how the September 2026 spam update fits in, and how to check your own pages. We stick to what Google and the sources below say and mark where we are offering our own judgment.
Key Takeaways
- Google’s helpful content guidance says raters are trained to evaluate four attributes of a page’s main content: effort, originality, talent or skill, and accuracy.
- Google defines low effort as, among other things, “using generative AI to produce large amounts of text without manual oversight or curation,” and says giving credit to other sources “doesn’t replace the need for original effort.”
- Google released its September 2026 spam update on September 24, 2026; it said the rollout could take up to two weeks. It is global, applies to all languages, and Google would not say what share of queries it affected.
- At Search Central Live Barcelona, Google’s Gary Illyes said Google filters out 40 billion spam pages a day and warned that scaled content is becoming more of a problem than link spam.
- Google says the question is quality, not who wrote the page: low-quality content can be human or AI generated.
- Using automation or AI “for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings” is a violation of Google’s spam policies; using it with real oversight and real facts is a different matter.
- For local service pages, the fix is concrete: real jobs, real photos, real prices or ranges, a named person, and no page that survives a find-and-replace of the town name.
What Is the Four-Point Quality Test Google Describes?
Google’s help page “Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content” was recently updated, and Search Engine Roundtable reported that the update added two main things: a section explaining that main content is critical, and a description of how Search Quality raters review it. Google defines main content as “any part of the web page that directly helps the page achieve its purpose.” Depending on the page, that includes the main text and media, interactive features such as calculators, customer reviews when they directly fulfill the page’s purpose, information inside tabs, and the page title and headings.
Then comes the part this post is about. Google says raters are trained to evaluate four attributes of that main content. In Google’s words:
- Effort. “The extent to which human work went into creating the content or the systems powering it.” Google’s examples of high effort include writing original analysis and building a custom interactive map. Its examples of little to no effort include “automatically generating pages from feeds or using generative AI to produce large amounts of text without manual oversight or curation.” It adds that attribution or giving credit to other sources doesn’t replace the need for original effort.
- Originality. “The extent to which the content offers unique, original information or perspectives that aren’t already available on other websites.”
- Talent or skill. Whether the content shows the skill needed to give visitors a satisfying experience, such as clear writing, well-produced video, or functional page tools. Google notes that not all content requires specialized expertise; it gives the example of someone sharing how they found a new way to clear a driveway of snow.
- Accuracy. For informational pages, the content should be factually accurate. For topics that could significantly impact people’s lives or well-being, it must be highly accurate and consistent with established expert consensus.
A few cautions before anyone treats this as a scoring formula. Google does not say these four produce a number. At Search Central Live, Google quality analyst Duy Nguyen said there is no single ranking system that works out quality, there are hundreds of signals, and they differ by the type of result, and that Google is running a huge number of tests all the time. Google also describes raters as people who help confirm whether its algorithms are producing good results, not as the people who place your page. And the guidance names E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) as a separate lens, adding that “of these aspects, trust is most important.”
Still, the four attributes give a small business something it rarely gets from Google: a plain-language description of what the quality bar looks like. Duy’s advice in Barcelona, as recapped by the agency We Are Roast, was simple: the guidelines are public, so read them. If you want the broader background on why Google keeps stressing this, our earlier post on what searchers want from helpful content covers the people-first side.
Why Did the September 2026 Spam Update Make This Urgent?
On September 24, 2026, at about noon Eastern, Google announced the September 2026 spam update. Search Engine Roundtable’s Barry Schwartz reported that Google called it a normal spam update that applies globally to all languages and locations, and that the rollout may take up to two weeks. That is notably longer than the earlier ones: Schwartz noted that this was the fourth spam update of 2026 and the previous three took only a couple of days. He confirmed with Google’s John Mueller that the longer timeline was not a typo; Mueller replied that it is likely to take longer than some of the previous ones.
A few details from that report matter for a small business:
- Google would not tell Schwartz what percentage of queries or searches were affected, so nobody outside Google can tell you how big this one was.
- The update does not target link spam, and Google did not mention changes to specific spam policies.
- Sites that violate Google’s spam policies “may rank lower in results or not appear in results at all.”
- Google says to review its spam policies if your site changed after an update. Improvement can come if its systems learn over a period of months that the site complies, and Search Engine Roundtable reports that Google will do periodic refreshes and that recovery can take many months.
The deeper signal came a few days later from Barcelona. According to We Are Roast’s Day 3 recap of Google Search Central Live, Gary Illyes closed the morning with one number: Google filters out 40 billion spam pages a day. He gave three reasons Google keeps updating how it judges quality: content formats have expanded, there are far more pages and sites than there used to be, and there are content issues, meaning spam, which the updates help Google catch. Among the spam types he listed were cloaking, doorway pages, scraped content, link spam, and hacked content. Then came the warning that matters most here: scaled content is now becoming more of a problem than link spam.
The same recap says the Google team described a high percentage of content as spam, said there have been more spam updates recently because there is so much more new content, and said the team is now using AI to help catch more of it. Illyes also noted that core updates don’t focus on websites; they target content at the page level, not the domain level, which is why some pages on a site go up while others go down. That is useful for a local business: one weak batch of pages is not necessarily a verdict on your whole site, and fixing the weak batch is a reasonable first move.
If your traffic moved in the last few weeks, our guide to recovering from Google’s August 2026 spam update walks through how to tell whether it was a spam update, a core update, or ordinary seasonality. Google posts rollout status on its Search ranking updates page, which is where completion of this one will be recorded.
When Does a Set of City Pages Count as Scaled Content?
Google’s spam policies have a section on scaled content abuse, and Google’s helpful content guidance links to it directly. The guidance says that if you use automation, including AI generation, “to produce content for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings, that’s a violation of our spam policies.” Notice the two parts of that sentence: the method (automation) and the purpose (manipulating rankings). Neither alone is the problem.
The same guidance includes a list of warning signs for search engine-first content. A few of them read like a checklist of bad local SEO habits:
- Are you producing lots of content on many different topics in hopes that some of it might perform well in search results?
- Are you using extensive automation to produce content on many topics?
- Are you mainly summarizing what others have to say without adding much value?
- Is the content mass-produced or spread across a large network of sites, so that individual pages don’t get much attention or care?
- Are you changing the date of pages to make them seem fresh when the content has not substantially changed?
Google does not publish a page count or a similarity threshold, and neither do we. What we can say, as our own judgment rather than a Google rule, is what the pattern looks like in practice. Here is a hypothetical example. Imagine an HVAC company that serves Allen and DeKalb counties and publishes 30 pages, one per town. Each page is 400 words. Each one says the company offers “fast, reliable furnace repair in [town],” lists the same six services, ends with the same call to action, and differs from its siblings only in the town name and one sentence about the town’s population. Run that through Google’s own questions. Where is the effort? What is original? What would a reader learn that they could not learn from the company’s main service page? Thirty pages, one idea.
Now flip it. Imagine the same company publishes six pages, each for a place where it actually works, and each one includes the kind of furnace that is common in that neighborhood’s older homes, a short real job write-up with photos, the technician who handled it, the permit or inspection situation if one applies, and a realistic note about how quickly the crew can arrive. Six pages is far fewer than thirty, but each page has effort and information a competitor does not have. That is the trade Google’s guidance points toward: fewer pages, each one earning its place.
Our earlier breakdown of Google’s spam policy on AI-generated content covers the policy language in more detail. What the new quality language adds is a way to describe the other side of the line, not just what to avoid, but what high effort looks like.
What Does a Local Service Page Look Like When It Passes?
Google’s guidance gives a lot of questions, and most of them translate directly into page elements. Here is our translation for a service business. It is our interpretation of Google’s questions, not a checklist Google has published.
- First-hand experience, shown. Google asks whether your content “clearly demonstrate[s] first-hand expertise and a depth of knowledge (for example, expertise that comes from having actually used a product or service, or visiting a place).” For a contractor, that means photos from your own jobs, with a sentence about what was hard about this one.
- A named human. Google asks whether it is self-evident who authored the content, whether pages carry a byline where one might be expected, and whether bylines lead to further information about the author. A page signed by the owner, with a link to a real bio, answers all three.
- No fake authors. Google says that fabricating creator profiles, such as with AI-generated headshots, made-up names, or false credentials, is a form of deception and a signal of a low-quality page.
- Something beyond the obvious. Google asks whether the content provides “insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond the obvious.” “We fix leaks” is obvious. How you decide between a repair and a replacement, with real ranges, is not.
- Value compared to other pages in the results. Search your own service and town. If your page says what the top three say with different words, there is no reason to prefer it.
- Accuracy. Google asks whether the content has any easily verified factual errors. Wrong service areas, old prices, an hours mismatch, or a licensing claim you cannot back up all count.
- Interactive tools, where they help. Google lists calculators and similar tools as main content. A simple estimator, a service-area map, or a scheduling form that actually works is part of the page’s value.
A page built that way is a different object from a template. For a business with a real local footprint, this is an advantage you can actually own. A chain or a generated site cannot honestly claim it has knocked on doors in Auburn, cut a lawn in Garrett, or served lunch to the courthouse crowd at noon. You can. The challenge is getting that knowledge out of your head and onto the page.
One of the Barcelona talks makes the same point from a different direction. As We Are Roast’s recap tells it, Juan Seguí of acceseo described a client whose product page said a double pram was “compact,” which isn’t enough for a parent, since the real question is whether it will fit in the lift with the parent inside. After the team added detailed FAQs that answered questions like that, organic clicks went up 14% and pre-sale questions to the team went down. That is one case from one speaker, not a promise of what you will see, but it shows what “beyond the obvious” means in practice: answer the question the customer is actually asking.
Can a Small Business Still Use AI to Write Its Pages?
Yes, and Google’s own text says so, with conditions. The guidance acknowledges “automated, AI-generated, and AI-assisted content” and frames the issue as three questions: Who created it, How was it created, and Why was it created.
Who. A visitor should be able to tell who is behind the page. That is where bylines, an About page, and credentials you can actually substantiate come in. We covered the author side of this in our post on AI content watermarking and SEO.
How. If automation is used to substantially generate content, Google suggests asking whether its use is self-evident to visitors through disclosures or in other ways, and whether you give background about how and why it was used. It says disclosures are useful where someone might reasonably wonder how the content was created. For most small business pages, the more useful “how” is operational: the facts came from your own job notes and photos, a person reviewed every claim, and a tool only helped with the wording.
Why. Google calls this “perhaps the most important question.” The right answer is that the content is created primarily to help people, and would be useful to visitors who arrived directly at your site. If the honest answer is to attract search visits, Google says that is not aligned with what its systems reward.
Reading this as a business owner, here is how we would draw the line, as our judgment rather than Google’s. AI is a fine drafting and editing tool when the inputs are yours: your job notes, your photos, your pricing, your service area, your voice. It is a poor substitute for those inputs. A model asked to “write a page about furnace repair in Waterloo, Indiana” has none of your experience to draw on, so it produces the average of every other furnace page, exactly the “nothing original” result that the originality attribute describes. The same tool, given a real job summary and asked to tighten the writing, is doing something quite different.
This is also the logic behind how we work. At Button Block, an AI employee can draft, organize, and check, but the facts about a business come from the business. If you are weighing where AI fits into your own marketing, our digital marketing team can walk through which tasks are safe to automate and which need a person.
How Can You Audit Your Own Pages in One Afternoon?
Google’s guidance recommends auditing any drops you saw: which pages were most impacted, for which searches, and how they hold up against the questions in the guidance. It also suggests asking people you trust, but who are not affiliated with your site, for an honest assessment. You can do a first pass yourself in an afternoon.
The One-Afternoon Page Audit
- List every service and location page. Put them in a spreadsheet with the URL, the main search each is meant to win, and its monthly visits from Search Console or your analytics.
- Do the find-and-replace test. Swap the town name on two sibling pages. If nothing else would need to change, mark both as thin.
- Look for the proof. For each page, ask whether it has at least one photo from a real job, one real detail only your crew would know, and one fact a customer could verify.
- Check the byline. Is it clear who wrote or reviewed the page, and does that name lead to a real bio?
- Check accuracy. Service areas, hours, phone, licenses, prices, and anything you cite. Fix or remove what you cannot support.
- Compare against the top three results. Does your page add something they do not? If not, write down what it could add.
- Decide page by page: keep and improve, merge several thin pages into one stronger page, or remove. Do not just change the dates.
- Write down your “how.” If AI helped, note what it was used for and who reviewed the output, so your answer to that question is consistent.
Merging or removing pages is a real change with real consequences for links and redirects, so make those decisions with someone who can handle the redirects correctly.
A word on word counts: Google’s guidance asks whether you are writing to a particular word count because you have heard Google has a preferred one, and answers in parentheses, “No, we don’t.” A tight 600-word page with real photos and one clear answer can beat a padded 2,000-word one. Length is not the test; effort and originality are.
What Doesn’t This Change?
Three clarifications, so the takeaway stays proportionate.
It is not an AI ban. Google’s own quality analyst said the point is the quality, not who wrote it, and that low-quality content can be human or AI generated. A lazy human-written page is not safer than a well-supervised AI-assisted one.
SEO itself is not the enemy. The guidance asks “What about SEO? Isn’t that search engine-first?” and answers that SEO can be a helpful activity when it is applied to people-first content. Good titles, clean structure, and clear internal links are still worth doing; they just cannot stand in for content worth reading.
We do not know how any single page scores. There is no public quality score, no rater is assigned to your site, and Google has not said how much weight each attribute carries. Anyone offering you a guaranteed quality rating is guessing. What you can do is take the described attributes seriously, make each page something you would stand behind, and let the evidence accumulate.
Let Us Review Your Service Pages Against Google’s Own Questions
Button Block audits a Northeast Indiana business’s service and location pages against the questions in Google’s helpful content guidance, flags the thin and duplicated ones, and rebuilds the pages worth keeping around your real jobs, photos, and expertise.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Does Google really penalize AI-written pages?
- Not for being AI-written. Google's helpful content guidance says that using automation, including AI generation, to produce content for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings is a violation of its spam policies. A Google quality analyst quoted at Search Central Live in Barcelona made the same point from the other side: the issue is the quality, not who wrote it, and low-quality content can be human or AI generated. What Google's text does single out as low effort is using generative AI to produce large amounts of text without manual oversight or curation.
- What are Effort, Originality, Talent or skill, and Accuracy?
- They are the four attributes Google says its Search Quality raters are trained to evaluate in the main content of a page. Effort is how much human work went into the content or the systems behind it. Originality is whether it offers information or perspectives not already on other websites. Talent or skill is whether it shows the skill needed to give visitors a satisfying experience, such as clear writing or working page tools. Accuracy means the content is factually correct, and for topics that could significantly affect people's lives or well-being it must be highly accurate and consistent with expert consensus.
- Are quality raters the ones who rank my pages?
- No. Google describes raters as people who give it insights on whether its algorithms seem to be producing good results, a way to confirm that its changes are working well. Their guidelines are public, though, and Google says reading them may help you self-assess your own content. At Search Central Live, a Google quality analyst said there is no single ranking system that works out quality: there are hundreds of signals that differ by the type of result.
- How many city pages is too many?
- Google does not publish a number, and we would not trust anyone who gives you one. Its guidance asks about pattern and purpose instead: are you producing lots of content on many different topics in hopes some of it performs, and is the content mass-produced so that individual pages do not get much attention or care? A practical test is whether each page would still be worth publishing if search engines did not exist. If a page about a town you have never worked in could be swapped for another town by changing one word, it fails that test.
- Do I need to disclose that AI helped write a page?
- Google's guidance asks you to think about the 'How' of your content. If automation is used to substantially generate content, it suggests asking whether the use of AI is self-evident to visitors through disclosures or other ways, and whether you explain how and why it was used. It says disclosures are useful where someone might reasonably wonder how the content was created. A page where a named owner or technician supplied the facts and photos and a tool helped draft the wording is in a very different position from a page generated from a keyword list.
- Will changing the date on old pages make them look fresh?
- No, and Google lists it as a warning sign. Its guidance asks whether you are changing the date of pages to make them seem fresh when the content has not substantially changed, and whether you are adding or removing lots of content just because you believe it makes your site seem fresh. Update a page's date when you have actually changed what it says.
- If a spam update hit my site, how long does recovery take?
- Google says sites that see a change after a spam update should review its spam policies, and that making changes may help if its automated systems learn over a period of months that the site complies. Search Engine Roundtable's report on the September 2026 spam update adds that Google will do periodic refreshes and that recovery can take many months. Google did not say what share of queries this update affected. If your rankings moved, audit first, fix what is actually thin or duplicated, and expect improvement to be gradual rather than immediate.
Sources & Further Reading
- Google Search Central: developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/creating-helpful-content, Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content
- Google Search Central: developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-policies, Spam policies for Google web search
- Search Engine Roundtable: seroundtable.com/google-september-2026-spam-update-42163.html, Google September 2026 Spam Update, September 24, 2026
- Search Engine Roundtable: seroundtable.com/google-helpful-content-main-content-and-eot-sa-42218.html, Google Helpful Content Doc With New Main Content & EOT/SA Sections
- We Are Roast: weareroast.com/news/google-search-central-live-deep-dive-barcelona-day-3-recap, Search Central Live Deep Dive Europe, Barcelona, Day 3 recap
- Google Search Status Dashboard: status.search.google.com, Ranking release history for the September 2026 spam update