Trust · Article 1 of 10
Who checks what AI publishes?
AI can now write a page in seconds, but it can't vouch for it. Google asks that AI-made content be reviewed and fact-checked by a person before it's published. A watermark only says where text came from, not whether it's true. Someone has to check, and answer for it.
Writing a page used to take a day. Today an AI can draft fifty in an hour. That's real progress, and it changes a simple question every business now has to answer: who checked this before it went out?
What Google says
Google doesn't penalize content for being made with AI. Its guidance is about quality, not the tool. It asks site owners to review and fact-check AI-generated content before publishing it, and that includes the small things: page titles, descriptions, structured data and image text. It also warns that producing many pages that add nothing for readers can count as spam, whatever tool made them.1
In plain words: AI can help you write. It can't be the last one to read.
A label is not a check
Some AI tools now add an invisible mark to the text they produce. OpenAI explained its approach in October 2026, and was candid about the limits: a watermark helps tell where text came from, but in its own words, "a watermark does not verify accuracy."2 Its detection also gets weaker when text is short or edited.
So a label answers "who wrote this?" It doesn't answer "is this true?"
Two versions of the same sentence about a doctor. Where they agree, the ink cancels. Where they differ, it burns. One number changed, and the whole claim changed with it.
The law doesn't make an exception
In the United States, the FTC has been direct about this. When it acted against businesses using AI to deceive customers, its message was that there is no AI exemption from the laws already on the books.3 Its rule on reviews, announced in August 2024, bans fake reviews, including ones written by AI.4
A false claim made with AI has the same consequence as one written by hand.
So, who checks?
Someone has to, and they have to be able to prove it.
Ask me how we do it for your business, on a free 30-minute call.
General information, not legal advice.
Charted and signedOctober 2026 · Alejandro Peñuela
Every claim in this article points to its source.