How Google Now Describes Effort, Originality and Accuracy

Google’s page on creating helpful, reliable, people-first content was updated on 5 October 2026, and it now borrows the vocabulary the Search Quality Raters guidelines use: main content, effort, originality, talent or skill, and accuracy. The page is the one most site owners cite when they argue about whether a post is good enough, so the new definitions are worth reading against what they actually say rather than what summaries of them claim. The related guidance on generative AI content, updated four days earlier, applies the same ideas to automatically produced text.

Main content is defined, and it is broader than body text

The people-first content page, last updated 2026-10-05 UTC, defines main content as any part of a page that directly helps it achieve its purpose. Its examples are the primary text and media, interactive tools, user contributions when they are relevant, tabbed sections, and titles and headings. A calculator on a page is main content. So is a tab panel, which matters for sites that move explanatory text behind tabs on the assumption that it no longer counts. The practical consequence is for audits: judge everything on the page that does the page’s job, including the tool and the tab panel, and not only the paragraph under the heading.

The four criteria, as the page words them

The page ties these to how raters assess main content:

• Effort: how much human work went into the content or the systems behind it. Pages that are automatically generated, or produced by AI with little oversight, show little to no effort, and crediting sources does not replace original effort.
• Originality: unique, original information or perspectives that are not already available elsewhere.
• Talent or skill: clear writing, well-produced media and functional tools. The page notes that not all content needs specialised expertise.
• Accuracy: informational pages should be factually correct, and content on topics that affect people’s lives or well-being must be highly accurate and match expert consensus.

The line about sources deserves attention. A roundup that restates three other articles with a link to each has cited its sources and added no effort in the page’s sense. The remedy is not to cite less. It is to add something that the cited pages do not contain: a measurement, a test on your own site, a comparison nobody has run.

Accuracy is the one criterion that can be checked line by line. Every date, figure and version number either matches its cited source or it does not. Effort and originality need judgement, while accuracy needs only a second reading with the sources open, and it is the cheapest of the four to enforce before publishing.

Who, how and why

The page keeps its three framing questions. On who, readers should be able to tell who created the content, with bylines that link to author background where readers would expect one, and the page warns against fabricated creator profiles such as AI-generated headshots or false credentials. On how, explaining how the content was produced builds trust, including disclosing automation or AI use where readers might reasonably wonder how it was made. On why, the page calls this the most important question: content should be created primarily to help people, not mainly to attract visits from search engines.

The three questions map onto concrete page elements. A byline with a real profile answers who. A short note on method answers how. The why is harder to evidence, and it is the one that fails first when a site publishes forty near-identical location pages.

Raters do not control rankings

The page describes quality raters as people who evaluate whether results seem helpful, using experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness as criteria, with no control over rankings and with data that is not used directly in ranking algorithms. It compares their ratings to comment cards that help Google check its systems are working. That framing is the correct way to read the four criteria above: they describe what a human reviewer looks for when judging results, and they are not a scoring formula to be optimised.

For sites already adjusting after the merging of the helpful content system into core ranking, nothing here asks for a new programme. The practical use is an audit question applied to each important page: what on this page did a person spend effort producing, and what does it say that the pages above it do not. Where the honest answer is nothing, the page has the problem the guidance describes, and the pages that handle health, money and safety topics have the least room to carry it.