Why it matters
Said at Search Central Live: when Google tokenizes a page for its index it attaches metadata to each word, such as whether it appeared in the page header, the main content, a heading or in bold. Text that only looks like a heading or bold text through CSS does not carry that information.
How to meet it
Put the page title in the title element, the visible title in an h1 and section titles in h2 to h6 elements, mark important terms with strong or b rather than CSS font-weight on spans, and keep emphasis sparing so it still means something.
How to test it
Template review or an HTML lint rule finds no headings or emphasis built from styled div or span elements.
How Regensbot covers it
Decided automatically once Regensbot renders your pages.
Headless Chromium renders the page on an isolated render service, and the raw and the rendered HTML run through the same parsers.
Sources
Google documents00
No Google document is cited. This requirement was said at Search Central Live and is not documented policy.
Claims in the knowledge base02
- D2-C323UndocumentedUnderstanding what's on a pageSaid on stage
- D2-C720UndocumentedHow does the index look like?Said on stage
Claim IDs refer to the Search Central Live 2026 knowledge base. The knowledge base (opens in a new tab)
- Undocumented
- Said or shown at the event, not in the documentation.