Google has made several updates to its spam policies and revised its quality guidelines to address concerns related to content created by artificial intelligence (AI) over the past year. Starting in October 2026, the page titled Create useful, reliable, and people-first content was updated to clarify what constitutes main content, outline criteria for quality evaluators, and explicitly reject fake author profiles. These changes were not highlighted in the official documentation update journal, which tracks major changes to Google's policies. The frequency of spam updates has increased significantly, with four updates released in 2026—March, June, August, and September—marking the highest number since the end of 2021. The time periods for deploying these updates have also shortened, with the March 2026 update lasting just 19 and a half hours, and others lasting less than three days. The updated content guidelines emphasize four key criteria from the Search Quality Raters' guidelines: effort, originality, talent or skill, and accuracy. The definition of effort specifically targets low-quality content, noting that using generative AI to produce large volumes of text without human oversight or selection shows little to no effort. Citing sources does not make up for a lack of original work. The section on "Who" focuses on ghost authors, describing AI-generated portraits, invented names, and fabricated references as "forms of deception." These deceptions reduce the reliability of pages for automated quality evaluation systems. On October 1, 2026, Google tightened its guidelines on the use of generative AI, stressing the need to manually verify all AI-generated content before publishing. The revised guidelines also cover title tags, meta descriptions, structured data, and image alt texts. Other changes over the past year include the inclusion of AI responses in the spam category on May 15, 2026, and updated anti-spam rules that address attempts to manipulate generative AI responses in Google Search. These rules apply to all websites, including those in the GEO (Google’s own content). On May 15, 2026, a new optimization guide for generative AI was introduced, advising against recycling content that could easily be produced by AI models. Publishers are now encouraged to audit their authors, remove any invented profiles, and link each signature to a real, verifiable person. They must also implement a documented human review of facts, title tags, meta descriptions, structured data, and image alt texts. Publishers are advised to measure the unique contribution of each page, including original data, lived experiences, and analysis, which AI models cannot produce alone. Pages lacking such contributions may be considered for merging or deletion before the next spam update. While Google does not outright ban AI, it targets mass-produced content that offers little added value, regardless of the method used. The evaluators' guidelines have remained unchanged since September 2025. On August 28, 2026, Google relaxed its enforcement of site reputation abuse rules in the European Economic Area after discussions with the European Commission.