Epic Insights

Edition 40  ·  Oct 6, 2026

The Big Story

Here's what changed. On Oct 1, Google updated its guidance on using AI to write website content. It now says "it is critical to manually factcheck and review all AI-generated content for accuracy and trustworthiness before publishing." That's a strong word for a Google help page, and Google explained why in one sentence: AI tools "don't retrieve facts, but predict a likely sequence of words."

That sentence is the whole problem. Ask a tool to write your services page and you'll get something that sounds exactly like a services page. It might also include a warranty you don't offer, a town you don't serve, or a certification nobody on your team holds, because those are the words that usually show up on pages like yours. It isn't lying. It's guessing, and it guesses with total confidence.

To be fair to the tools, Google isn't banning AI. Its question is the same one it asks about any page: is it accurate, and does it help the person reading it?

The timing matters, though. Google's September spam update hit a second wave on Sept 30 and should wrap up around Oct 8. At a Google event in Barcelona last week, attendees reported Google saying it's running more spam updates because there's so much more new content to sort through, and that mass-produced pages are now a bigger problem than spammy links. SEO researchers watching the sites taking hits say many of them publish the same cookie-cutter pages businesses used to buy from bargain writers before AI came along.

So the advice is old, and it still holds. Somebody who knows your business reads every page before it goes live. AI just made skipping that step a lot more tempting.

Quick Hits

Ask Epic

No! Please don't pull them down.

Google has never said AI-written pages break its rules. What it cares about is whether a page is accurate and helps the person reading it. A page that's true and useful is fine, however the first draft got written.

So instead of deleting, read. Go through each page and check the facts: services, towns, hours, guarantees, anything with a number in it. AI drafts love to make promises, so look hard at anything that sounds like one.

Then add what a tool couldn't know. The question you hear on every estimate. The thing you tell customers that the big chains don't. A sentence about how you actually do the job.

If you've got a lot of pages and not a lot of evenings, that's what we're here for. Send us the list and we'll work through it with you.

What Epic's doing for you this week

This week we're watching traffic across the sites we report on while the spam update finishes, so nobody makes changes in a hurry. We're checking which ad accounts we manage are in line for Google's automated promotions on Oct 12, and making sure the offers on those websites are current. And we're rereading the content we've published for clients against Google's updated AI guidance. Anything that needs you will land in your Client Center.