Google: fake author profiles signal a low-quality page

Google has added a new paragraph to its guidance for site owners on creating helpful, reliable, people-first content. According to Search Engine Journal, the paragraph explicitly defines invented author profiles, made up to make content look as if human experts wrote it, as deception.

What did Google add to the guidance?

The new paragraph sits in the part of the guidance that covers who created the content, right after the advice to add accurate authorship information. Google gives AI-generated headshots, made-up names and false credentials as examples of fabricated profiles. It says any form of deception makes a page untrustworthy to both users and Google's automated quality systems, and counts as a signal of a low-quality page.

Is this different from the quality raters' guidelines?

The idea is not new: the Search Quality Rater Guidelines already treat fake author profiles, AI-generated author images and false claims of expertise as deception and tell raters to give such pages the lowest rating. What changes is that the principle is now written in guidance addressed directly to site owners rather than to raters. The guidance also says raters have no control over how pages rank, while the new paragraph refers to automated systems. How those systems would recognise a fake profile is not explained.

The article also recalls that bylines do not help pages rank better on their own, as Google's Search Liaison account has said before. The point is not to add an author name; it is that the information added must be real.

What should content teams in Turkey do?

For sites that publish expert-signed content on topics such as health, finance and law, this paragraph can work as a checklist. In mass-produced content in particular, signatures such as "specialist doctor" or "consultant" that are not tied to a real person are risky.

• Make sure every name, photo and title on author pages belongs to a real, verifiable person.
• If you use an AI-generated headshot or a fictional expert profile, remove it; publishing content with no clear author under a company byline is the more honest choice.
• Have content that needs expert approval actually read by that expert; without approval, do not use the expert's name.