Google is making it easier for searchers to find the most credible stories with a new “Fact Check” label which has been added to Google News. Fact Check joins existing labels in Google News, such as In-Depth, Opinion, Wikipedia, Local Source, Highly Cited, and others.
Publishers who have done the due diligence of fact-checking their articles are eligible to receive the “Fact check” label next to their stories. To be clear, Google is not manually fact checking articles. The onus is on the author to both fact check the article and add the “Fact check” label to it.
Adding the fact check label to a news article is accomplished through a new type of schema markup called ClaimReview. Google says it is especially concerned with publishers adding this markup to “round-up stories that contain multiple fact-check analyses within a single article.”
However, it won’t be as simple as writing the article, adding a piece of schema markup code, and hitting the publish button. In order to prevent abuse of the fact check label, there is a strict set of criteria to meet.
If Google discovers publishers using the ClaimReview markup, without meeting the criteria, it may ignore the markup or remove the site from Google News altogether.
In addition to looking for ClaimReview markup, the search giant says: “We also look for sites that follow the commonly accepted criteria for fact checks.” What exactly that means is up to one’s own interpretation, but it’s likely similar to what is listed in the help article linked to above.
Google News’ fact check label is available first in the United States and United Kingdom.
