Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content (Google's guidance)

The short version: Show your work: bylines, methods, sources and dates.

What they studied

Google's own checklist for judging whether content is made for people or made to rank.

Key findings

• Google asks whether content adds original information, research or analysis, and goes beyond the obvious.
• Warning signs include producing lots of content on many unrelated topics, heavy automation, summarizing others without adding anything, and changing dates to look fresh.
• Trust is the most important part of E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness). E-E-A-T is not itself a ranking factor.
• Google says it has no preferred word count.
• It asks creators to make clear who made the content, how (including any AI use) and why.

Key learnings

• Show your work: bylines, methods, sources and dates.
• Add something new on every page: data, testing, experience or analysis.
• Disclose AI or automation where a reader would wonder how a page was made.

Things to keep in mind

• Guidance, not a list of ranking signals. Google describes goals, not weights.

Read it alongside

• Is Google getting worse? A year of product review search results (ECIR 2024 (Leipzig University, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar), 2024)
• AI features and your website (Google's own guidance) (Google Search Central, 2025)

Source

Official guidance by Google, published by Google Search Central, October 5, 2026.

• https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/creating-helpful-content

We read the source and checked every figure on this page against it on October 13, 2026. Summaries and learnings are ours. Spotted an error? Tell us.

More research like this in SEO Insights Central.