6 October 2026 · SEO Dispatch
Google says fact check all AI content, including titles and meta descriptions
Google's guidance on generative AI content, updated 1 October 2026, says to manually fact check and review AI written content before publishing, and that this includes the metadata people see in search results.
The short answer
Yes. If an AI tool wrote your page titles or meta descriptions, read them before they go live.
That is no longer just good sense. On 1 October 2026, Google updated its Search Central page on using generative AI content on your website. It now says:
"It is critical to manually factcheck and review all AI-generated content for accuracy and trustworthiness before publishing."
The very next sentence widens the scope beyond body copy. The review "also applies to metadata like <title> elements, meta description elements, structured data, and alternate texts for images, which can appear in Search results."
Why Google says this
Google gives the reason in plain terms. Generative models "don't retrieve facts, but predict a likely sequence of words based on their training data." Because of that, their output can contain inaccuracies, which Google calls hallucinations: text that sounds confident and is simply wrong.
Search Engine Land's Barry Schwartz reported the change the same day. He noted that Google described the edit as bringing its documentation in line with what it already presents at developer events. So this is a clearer statement of existing guidance, not the launch of a new ranking system.
Why titles and meta descriptions are on the list
A quick definition first. The title element is the page title in your HTML, the text that often becomes the blue headline in search results. The meta description is a short summary in your HTML that search engines may show under that headline.
These are tiny pieces of text, but they are often the first thing a stranger reads about you. They are also exactly where AI written copy tends to slip, because the model is filling a short slot with something plausible. Common problems look like this:
- A price, location or opening hours that do not match the page.
- A feature or service you do not offer.
- "Free" or "same day" when that is not true.
- A year or season that is already out of date.
- The same description pasted across many pages, so none of them describes its own page.
Google's list also names two less visible fields:
- Structured data is code on the page that describes it to search engines, for example a product's price or a recipe's cooking time. Google's AI features page says to make sure your structured data matches the visible text on the page. The updated guidance also says to validate the markup.
- Alt text (alternative text) describes an image for people using screen readers and for search engines. AI tools often guess at it. A guess about what is in a photo is not a description of it.
What this guidance is, and what it is not
This is official guidance from Google about how to publish responsibly. It is not a ranking study. Google has not published data showing that reviewed metadata ranks better or earns more clicks than unreviewed metadata, and we are not claiming it does.
Fact checking also does not control what Google shows. Google can still rewrite a title or snippet in its results. What a careful review does is reduce the chance that something false goes out under your name, on your page, in front of the people you want as customers.
The same Google page has a second warning worth knowing. Using generative AI to produce many pages without adding value for users may violate Google's spam policy on scaled content abuse. Review is not only about typos. It is about whether the page should exist at all.
A simple review pass for AI written metadata
You do not need a big process. For each title, meta description, structured data block and alt text an AI tool drafted:
- Check every fact against the page. Prices, places, dates, names, numbers and product details should match what the page actually says.
- Read it as a promise. If a customer took the sentence literally, would you be comfortable?
- Make it specific to this page. If the same line would fit five other pages, rewrite it.
- Match structured data to visible content. If the markup says something the page does not show, fix one or the other, then validate it.
- Look at the image before you accept alt text. Describe what is really there.
- Check the live page after publishing. Your CMS preview is not proof. Our guide on how to check a live SEO change walks through it.
If you build with an AI site builder or a no code tool that fills SEO fields automatically, open those fields at least once. Defaults written by a model are still AI written content.
How SEO Dispatch handles this
SEO Dispatch can draft titles, meta descriptions and page content for you in Fixes and Content. Those are drafts. You read them, change what is wrong, and paste them into your own CMS or builder. We never publish to your site.
We built it that way before Google's update, and the update is a good reason to keep it. A tool can save you the blank page. It cannot know whether you actually open on Sundays.
For more on how we think about evidence and what we will not promise, read Most SEO evidence is uncontrolled.
Checklist
- Treat every AI written title, meta description, structured data block and alt text as a draft.
- Check each fact against the page it describes.
- Rewrite anything generic or untrue.
- Validate structured data and make sure it matches what visitors can see.
- Confirm the change on the live URL after you publish.
- Do not expect review alone to change rankings or clicks. It keeps what you publish accurate.
Sources
- Google Search Central, "Google Search's guidance on using generative AI content on your website" (last updated 1 October 2026): https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/using-gen-ai-content
- Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land, 1 October 2026: https://searchengineland.com/google-search-now-says-its-critical-to-manually-factcheck-and-review-all-ai-generated-content-for-accuracy-and-trustworthiness-493070
- Google Search Central, "AI features and your website" (structured data should match visible text): https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ai-features