Google often rolls out a core algorithm update prior to the end of year holiday season. If that pattern holds for 2026, given all the recent updates to Google’s guidance and recently published research papers, Google’s next update may be an important one.
Things to expect are:
- Prioritization of user experience and satisfaction
- Focus on authentic content
- Changes to how Google surfaces fan-out queries,
- And possibly the introduction of new algorithms for handling content quality.
These changes indicate that SEOs, site publishers, and ecommerce merchants should review their content strategy and how user satisfaction is prioritized in order to better align with the kind of content Google may be ranking in the near future.
Major Spam Updates Clear The Table
Google has a history of rolling out at least one and as many as two updates prior to and during the end of year holiday season in the United States. What makes this season’s likely update significant is that Google is in the midst of a two-week spam update. This indicates that Google may be clearing the table in advance of introducing major changes to how sites are ranked.
Changes To Helpful Content Guidance
Although it’s been reported that Google updated their helpful content guidance with a warning about fake authorship and profile data, Google also updated the same page with several paragraphs about content quality and prioritizing user satisfaction. That, in my opinion, is the bigger news to focus on.
Content Quality And User Satisfaction
The updated guidance says this:
“…one of the most critical factors for assessing page quality is the quality of the main content, specifically how effectively it allows the page to achieve its purpose and provide a satisfying user experience.”
Elsewhere it shares the importance of actual talent and skill in connection to published content:
“Talent or skill: Whether the content shows the talent, skill, or expertise necessary to provide a satisfying experience for visitors (such as clear writing, well-produced video, or functional page tools). Keep in mind that not all content requires specialized expertise. For example, a person sharing their experience about finding a new way to clear their driveway of snow generally doesn’t necessarily require specialized expertise.”
There is no way to directly impact user satisfaction signals. But there are direct ways to impact user satisfaction itself. Google’s updated guidance says that high-quality content should:
- fulfill its purpose
- satisfy users,
- and reflect meaningful effort, originality, skill, and accuracy.
Those are ways to cause a positive impact on user satisfaction.
User behavior and satisfaction signals have been an important part of Google’s algorithms since 2004’s Navboost patent and Google has used branded search queries as relevance signals since at least 2012. Further, Google published a trust rank patent that is about identifying sites that users trust then using that as a seed set for identifying sites that the user-trusted sites link to (the patent doesn’t call it a seed set, but that’s how it functions). SEOs and site owners should seriously consider how user satisfaction signals are a part of Google’s ranking and thus should also be a consideration for all site design and content choices.
Changes Affect More Than Text Content
All of the factors in the new guidance center on the main content. The nuance however is that the definition of main context extends beyond just text.
SEOs and site owners traditionally focus on text content but all the other kinds of content are also a part of the new guidance, which gives a strong indication that non-text elements may also play a stronger ranking related role in the next update.
The updated helpful content guidance explains:
“Google Search defines “main content” as any part of the web page that directly helps the page achieve its purpose. Depending on the primary intent of the page, the main content directly fulfills the page’s purpose and could include:
Primary text and media: The main text, articles, images, audio, or video files on the page.”
Interactive Features
Google names interactive features as a type of main content. This covers functionality, including search functionality, which is surprising to see mentioned here. Search functionality could be something that Google may increase focus on.
The other interactive features named are:
- Calculators
- Online tools and games.
The focus here is that these functionalities must fulfill the purpose of the web page.
The purpose of a web page goes far beyond the standard SEO consideration of things like keywords, entities, and other low common denominator SEO factors that is too often passed along as important to focus on.
Be better than that by focusing on the purpose of the page, which means focusing on what a user’s goal is on the page and how the page helps them achieve that.
That kind of focus goes beyond just putting “People Also Asked” keywords in the headings and titles, a practice that in my opinion is the kind of activity that signals the content is created by search engines, not for people. That kind of SEO focus on keywords can appear unnatural and is easy to spot.
User Generated Content
This is another interesting part of Google’s new guidance. This is what it says:
“User-generated contributions: Forum discussions, customer reviews, comments, or user-uploaded media when they directly fulfill the page’s purpose (for example, when the page is about discussing a particular user question).”
Tabbed Or Expanded Content
This is another form of content that the new guidance calls out as having to fulfill the web page’s purpose.
Page Titles And Headings
Titles and headings are traditionally considered SEO ranking factors and the way SEOs use them creates a mismatch between the content and the headings. I noticed since at least 2012 that Google was ranking web pages that didn’t contain the exact match keywords in the titles or the headings. That shouldn’t have been surprising to anyone back in 2012 and should be less surprising in 2026.
Yet SEOs and site owners continue to think of search ranking in terms of an exact match system. In my opinion, it could very well be that having exact match keywords across an entire site’s page titles and headings is a signal of unhelpful content. It’s a strong pattern that the web page is optimized for search engines and not humans.
Google’s new guidance says titles and headings are a part of the main content and summarize topics:
“The visible title and headings throughout a page that summarize its topic and helps users make informed decisions about visiting.”
There’s nothing there about using them because it’s what you want to rank for. The key, in my opinion, is how they’re used to “summarize” the web page “topic and helps users make informed decisions about visiting.”
Seriously, don’t load up a page with your competitor’s keywords or what an SEO tool says are the most popular keywords. Focus on summarizing what that section of content is about so that site visitors can know what that block of content is about, not for Google, but for your site visitors. Every little bit that makes the content easy to understand and also skim is helpful to boosting user satisfaction.
Authenticity And AI
Lastly, Google called attention to the issue of website and content authenticity, within both the helpful content guidance and their documentation of what is considered the proper use of generative AI.
In the first change, the helpful content guidance on AI was about the use of fake creator and author information.
Here’s what the new guidance from Google recommends:
“However, avoid using deceptive authorship information. Fabricating creator profiles (such as by using AI-generated headshots, made-up names, or false credentials to make content appear as if it was written by human experts) is a form of deception. Any form of deception makes a page untrustworthy to both users and our automated quality systems, and is a signal of a low-quality page.”
The second AI-related guidance from Google advises SEOs and publishers to fact check their content:
“Keep in mind that generative models don’t retrieve facts, but predict a likely sequence of words based on their training data. Because of this, generative AI outputs may contain inaccuracies (also known as hallucinations). It is critical to manually fact check and review all AI-generated content for accuracy and trustworthiness before publishing.”
SEOs Anticipate Change
Some in the SEO industry share the feeling that an update is coming from Google.
Trevor Stolber posted on LinkedIn:
“Google is about to throw the hammer down.
Experienced SEOs have seen these games and this story before.
Some “gurus” are about to be humbled and some people are about to be very surprised.”
Lily Ray recently tweeted:
“If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve probably also connected the dots:
All signs point to a major Google update on the horizon.
This is especially true with Google’s recent communications and edits to their documentation this past week.”
Will Google’s Ranking Become Granular?
The question is, will Google be fact-checking content and authorship information on such a granular level at scale? Google has likely amassed a massive amount of data from identifying scaled low quality content networks and has recently published at least two research papers about hunting down networks of AI slop. Will the data from those efforts be used to identify less-scaled low quality content?
And what about ranking sites on a more granular basis based on content quality and user satisfaction, will Google’s algorithms also become more granular at scale there?
There have been six updates since 2021 that were preceded or happened simultaneously with a spam update. In those kinds of cases it can be viewed that Google may have been clearing the table in preparation for adding something new to the ranking algorithms. The only outlier is the October 2023 Spam Update which was not preceded by an official spam update.
Featured Image by Shutterstock/THP Creative
