title: "No rule changes this run: what Google and Apple told us about AI, accessibility, and E-E-A-T"
date: 2026-09-20
version: 1.6.9
slug: no-rule-changes-september-2026-google-apple-eeat-wcag
description: "No new SEOCode checks this run, but there is a lot to know. Google clarified E-E-A-T and AI content disclosure. Apple explained how Applebot works. And WCAG 2.2 is now the standard you should be testing against."
tags: ["E-E-A-T", "AI content", "Applebot", "WCAG 2.2", "accessibility", "robots.txt", "GEO"]
No rule changes this run: what Google and Apple told us about AI, accessibility, and E-E-A-T
No new checks were added to SEOCode this run. But the sources we monitor had a lot to say, and some of it is worth knowing right now.
What changed in Google and AI search
WCAG 2.2 is now the accessibility standard you should be using
WCAG stands for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. It is the rulebook that says how websites should be built so that people with disabilities can use them.
There are different versions of WCAG. For a long time, many sites aimed for version 2.1. That is now out of date.
WCAG 2.2 is the current version. It adds nine new rules that 2.1 did not have. It is also backwards compatible, which means if your site passes WCAG 2.2, it automatically passes 2.1 and 2.0 as well. You do not need to test against the older versions separately.
This matters even more if your site operates in Europe. The European Accessibility Act (EAA) is a law that requires many websites to be accessible. The European standard used to check EAA compliance now points to WCAG 2.2. If you are auditing your site for EAA compliance, WCAG 2.2 is what you need to test against.
What to do: Ask your developer or accessibility auditor to check your site against WCAG 2.2, not 2.1 or 2.0.
E-E-A-T is not a score. There is nothing to game.
You may have heard of E-E-A-T. It stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. It is a framework Google uses to think about content quality.
Google has now said clearly: E-E-A-T is not a specific ranking factor. There is no E-E-A-T score. Google does not calculate a number and rank you by it.
What Google does instead is use a mix of signals to find content that shows these qualities. Trust is the most important of the four. If people cannot trust your content, the rest does not matter much.
For topics like health, money, or legal advice (Google calls these "Your Money or Your Life" topics), Google pays extra attention to these signals.
What to do: Do not try to trick a score that does not exist. Instead, write content that is genuinely helpful. Show who wrote it. Be clear about how it was made. Write from real experience where you have it.
If you use AI to write content, Google wants you to say so
Google's guidance says you should add a disclosure when AI or automation played a big role in creating your content, especially when readers would reasonably want to know.
This applies most to things like product reviews, news articles, and research pieces. For those kinds of content, readers often care about who or what created it.
Google asks three questions about AI-generated content:
- Is it clear to visitors that automation was used?
- Is there background on how automation was used?
- Is there an explanation of why automation was useful here?
Using AI to pump out content just to rank higher on Google is against Google's spam rules.
What to do: If AI wrote or substantially helped write a piece of content, say so. Explain what it did and why you used it. Keep the focus on helping the reader, not on chasing rankings.
Applebot and the nosnippet tag: two different things to know
Applebot is Apple's web crawler. It reads your website so Apple products like Siri and Apple Intelligence can use your content.
There are two separate things Applebot can do with your content, and you can control them separately.
Using your content in AI answers. When someone asks Siri a question, Apple may pull from your page to help form an answer. If you do not want that, you can add a nosnippet tag to your page. This tells Applebot not to use that page as context for AI-generated answers.
Using your content to train AI models. This is different. To stop Apple from using your content to train its AI models, you block a separate crawler called Applebot-Extended in your robots.txt file. (A robots.txt file is a small text file on your website that tells crawlers what they are and are not allowed to do.)
What to do: Decide what you are comfortable with. If you want to stop your content from appearing in Siri answers, use the nosnippet tag. If you want to stop training data use only, block Applebot-Extended in robots.txt. You can do one, both, or neither.
Applebot follows your Googlebot rules if you have not set Applebot rules
This one is simple but easy to miss.
If your robots.txt file has rules for Googlebot but says nothing about Applebot, Applebot will follow the Googlebot rules.
That means if you have blocked Googlebot from certain pages, Applebot is also blocked from those pages, even if you did not mean to block it.
What to do: If you want Applebot to behave differently from Googlebot, add separate Applebot rules to your robots.txt. If you are happy for Applebot to follow your Googlebot rules, you do not need to do anything.
A new guide library for getting found in AI search
A company called Presenc AI has published a large set of free guides on how to get your website seen in AI-powered search tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI answers.
This area is called GEO, short for Generative Engine Optimization. It is the AI-era version of SEO.
The guides cover things like how to set up your robots.txt for AI crawlers, how to structure your content so AI tools can read it well, and how to measure whether AI search is sending you traffic.
What to do: If getting found in AI search tools matters to your business, the Presenc AI guide library at presenc.ai/guides is worth a look. For anything Google-specific, always check Google's own documentation too.
Sources
- arXiv Computer Vision & Computational Linguistics (GEO Papers)
- Wikidata Entity & Schema Changelog
- Google Knowledge Graph Search API Guide
- Cohere RAG & Retrieval Embeddings Documentation
- Mistral AI Crawling & Embeddings Documentation
- Applebot & Apple Intelligence Crawler Guidelines
- Presenc AI — Generative Engine Research
- Zipie / AI Search Insights
- Google Search Quality Rater Guidelines (E-E-A-T)
- W3C Web Content Accessibility (WCAG) Guidelines
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