What Google Search Essentials are, and what the check covers

The technical requirements

These are the minimum to be eligible at all. Googlebot must not be blocked from the page. The page must return a working status, 200, when fetched. It must contain indexable content: text a crawler can read, not an image of text and not content that only appears after a login.

That is the whole list. It is short on purpose. Most pages meet it without trying, and a page that fails it is invisible no matter how good the words are.

The spam policies

These describe what gets a page or a whole site removed. Cloaking, where the crawler sees one page and the visitor another. Hidden text and links. Keyword stuffing. Content scraped from other sites. Pages made in bulk with no value of their own. Expired domains bought for their old reputation. Site sections rented out to a third party's content.

Pages that exist only to catch a search and pass the visitor elsewhere are on the list too. The location pages guide covers that one in depth, because it is the trap local businesses fall into most.

The spam policies are the part people fear and the part that is easiest to stay clear of. Every item on the list is a trick. If you are describing your real business in your own words, none of them apply to you.

The key best practices

This is the longest part and the least strict. Create helpful, reliable, people-first content. Use words people would use to search. Make links crawlable. Tell Google about your pages with a sitemap. Use structured data. Make images and video accessible. Manage how you appear in results with titles and descriptions. Keep the site usable on any device.

None of these are rules you can break. They are the things Google says it looks at. The list is worth reading once in Google's own words; it is a page, not a book.

How the builder's check maps to them

Website Builder Studio runs a check on every page before it publishes. The check is validated against Google Search Essentials and modern web standards. A page that fails does not publish, and the in-app assistant says why.

The wording is deliberate. Validated against means the check was built by reading the published requirements and testing pages against them. It does not mean Google has looked at the check or at your site. Nobody can say that honestly, and you should be wary of anyone who does.

• Technical requirements: a real status on every address, crawlable text, and a branded not-found page with the real status.
• Spam policies: a uniqueness check that strips city, state and industry names before it measures, so a swapped template fails.
• Best practices: a title and description per page, one main heading, breadcrumbs, internal links, a sitemap and structured data.

What remains your job

The best practices ask for helpful, reliable, people-first content. A check can confirm the page has a heading and a title and a status. It cannot confirm the words are true, or that a customer in your town would find them genuinely useful.

That comes from the interview. The in-app assistant asks about your services, your areas, who you serve and what makes you different, and the page is written from a conversation. Honest, specific answers make pages that sit inside the best practices on their own. Vague ones make pages that pass the check and say nothing.

Keeping it true is yours as well. Prices change, areas change, staff change. A page that was accurate when it published and is wrong now is a reliability problem in Google's terms and a trust problem in a customer's.

Where the AI answer engines fit

The AI answer engines like ChatGPT and Google's AI answers read pages the way search does. Google says there is nothing extra to do for its AI features beyond the same Essentials. A page eligible for search is a page eligible to be read by them. Whether they cite it is their choice.

So the same list applies. Meet the technical requirements, stay far from the spam policies, and follow the best practices with real content. There is no separate checklist for AI, and anyone selling you one is selling you the same list with a new name.