1. What Google says now, in its words
The page is "Google Search's guidance on using generative AI content on your website", marked "Last updated 2026-10-01"; Google's changelog for that day says it was updated with material from the Search Quality Raters guidelines. It opens kindly: "Generative AI can be particularly useful when researching a topic, and to add structure to original content." The warning follows at once: using such tools "to generate many pages without adding value for users may violate Google's spam policy on scaled content abuse".
Then the rule for a one-truck company: "It is critical to manually factcheck and review all AI-generated content for accuracy and trustworthiness before publishing." The reason: "generative models don't retrieve facts, but predict a likely sequence of words", so the output "may contain inaccuracies (also known as hallucinations)". The check is wider than the text: "This review also applies to metadata like <title> elements, meta description elements, structured data, and alternate texts for images".
The spam policies page (last updated August 28, 2026) gives the example in full: "using generative AI tools or other similar tools to generate many pages without adding value for users". The "helpful, people-first content" page (last updated October 5, 2026) adds that AI text "without manual oversight or curation represents little to no effort" and asks whether the use of AI is "self-evident to visitors through disclosures or in other ways". A disclosure is not required; Google calls it useful.
2. What it costs, and whether it helps a small contractor
The chatbot is cheap. The ChatGPT pricing page, read October 13, 2026, lists four individual plans per user per month: Free at $0, Go at $8 (the page says this plan "may include ads"), Plus at $20 and Pro from $100. Arithmetic: Plus is $240 a year. The expensive part is the agency package of "AI city pages", and that is the example Google's spam policy names.
Does it help? For one honest page, yes. A chatbot turns your facts (what you do, where, your license number, three real jobs with your photos) into clean paragraphs in a minute. It fails exactly where Google says: it will add a permit rule, a warranty or a price you never gave it, because it predicts words rather than looks things up. Those are the lines you delete.
Why it matters more than a year ago. BrightLocal's Local Consumer Review Survey 2026 (1,002 US adults, February 11, 2026): 45% used ChatGPT and other generative AI tools for local business recommendations, up from 6% in 2025. Pew Research Center (900 US adults, March 2025): with an AI summary on the Google results page, people clicked a regular result on 8% of visits, against 15% without one. Your service page is now read by people, by Google and by the chatbots your customers ask. A thin page gets less from all three.
Verdict: worth trying cheaply. $0 to $20 a month, one page at a time, your own facts in, a person reading every sentence, the title and every photo caption before it goes live. Not worth the money: hundreds of near-identical AI pages for every town you serve.
3. This week
- 01Pick one page, the service you want more calls for. Give the chatbot your facts only and tell it to add nothing you did not give it.
- 02Read every sentence. Strike any price, code, permit or warranty claim you did not put in.
- 03Check the page title, the meta description and the alt text under each photo. Google says the review covers them too.
- 04Do not order "a page for every town". One page with your real list of towns beats twelve near-copies.
- 05If an agency writes your site, ask in writing how much is AI and who checks it. Rules for advertising in your state are a question for your attorney.