Machine-translation QA flag (September 11, 2025 QRG)

Google's January 23, 2025 Quality Rater Guidelines update added explicit language about machine-translated content with no human review as a form of scaled content abuse (§4.6.5). This is also the enforceable webmaster-facing spam policy (updated 2026-05-15), which names "automated transformations like synonymizing, translating, or other obfuscation techniques" as scaled content abuse: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-policies

"Using automated tools (generative AI or otherwise) as a low-effort way to produce many pages that add little-to-no value."

Machine-translated content is fine when reviewed by a human speaker and corrected. Untranslated MT — or "lightly post-edited" output that still contains hallucinated terms, wrong gender/number agreement, or untranslated proper nouns — is treated as scaled content abuse.

Signals the seo-hreflang audit should surface

Signal	Severity	Notes
Multiple `hreflang` alternates point to URLs whose content is identical except for header chrome	Critical	Indicates the body wasn't translated; just template wrapped.
`lang="xx"` attribute on `<html>` doesn't match the body language	High	Translation pipeline output without a final QA step.
Auto-translated `<meta name="description">` longer than 160 chars (untrimmed)	Medium	The translator overran the snippet limit — no human reviewer caught it.
`lang` attribute is `auto` or missing entirely	Medium	Pages that don't declare their language confuse hreflang + AI crawlers.
Untranslated proper nouns or product names sprinkled in body	Low (heuristic)	Common MT failure mode; hard to detect automatically.
Schema.org `inLanguage` field absent or wrong	Medium	Multi-language audits should cross-check `inLanguage` vs. body.

What the audit should NOT flag

Sites that have a few MT pages clearly labelled as MT (a human-translation-fallback pattern). Google's QRG explicitly permits MT when honestly labelled and clearly scoped.
Machine-translated UI strings — those are i18n, not "content".
Content with lang="auto" if the audit can't fetch a fallback signal (be conservative; don't claim what we can't verify).

Cross-skill delegation

For per-page hreflang validation, stay inside seo-hreflang.
For broader scaled-content scoring (entropy of translated pages, AI-pattern detection in body), defer to seo-content via claude-seo run content_quality.py.
For "is this translated by Google's own auto-translate widget" detection, look for the .goog-te-banner-frame iframe. There is no per-mechanism exemption: in June 2025 Google removed the robots.txt-blocking guidance for auto-translated pages, and auto/AI- translated content is now judged case-by-case on user value. Use page-level noindex for low-value translated pages, not sitewide blocks; the widget also produces poor passage-citability.

Primary sources

Current QRG (September 11, 2025; 182 pages; nothing newer through 2026-07-09): https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/hsw-sqrg.pdf
John Mueller on MT (multiple SOTR episodes, 2024-2025): MT is OK when reviewed by a human; bulk MT without review is abuse.

Last verified: 2026-07-09.