Google defines the main content of a page in its content guidelines

The new version of the search engine documentation explicitly distinguishes content created with human effort from texts produced at scale by AI. This is a clue for companies that build traffic through content.

Google updated the document “Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content” on Search Central on October 1, 2026. For the first time, it explicitly defined the concept of “main content” in it, meaning any part of a website that directly helps achieve its purpose. Industry outlets Search Engine Roundtable and Search Engine Journal reported the change on October 2.

Google includes articles, images, audio and video, interactive elements (calculators, tools, search engines), user reviews and comments, if they serve the page’s purpose, as well as titles and headings, in the main content. Content in tabs and expandable sections is acceptable, provided the user has real access to it.

The documentation describes four characteristics evaluated by Quality Raters, the people who check the quality of results. Google uses their assessments to train machine learning systems. These characteristics are effort, originality, talent or experience, and accuracy. As an example of low effort, Google points to the automatic generation of pages from data and the mass production of text by generative AI without human oversight. Simply citing the source does not replace your own work. For YMYL topics (concerning the reader’s health, finances, or safety), high accuracy consistent with expert consensus is required.

The new section warns against deceptive authorship: made-up authors, AI-generated photos, and fake credentials. Google considers this a signal of low page quality. On the same day, the company also supplemented separate documentation on content from generative AI. It requires manual fact-checking before publication, including in titles, meta descriptions, structured data, and image alt text.

Google did not announce a new algorithm or a date for rolling out ranking changes on this occasion. However, Marie Haynes, the author of the article in Search Engine Journal, predicts a major search update soon. Google has not confirmed this. Companies publishing content at scale with the help of AI can already compare their pages with the new definition of main content.