Knowledge base v2.13.0 · Community edition · data through 2 October 2026
Thing · Concept
People who rate the quality of Google's results against published guidelines; their ratings test changes and do not rank pages.
Glossary · Search quality raters
External reviewers who rate results for changes Google is testing, following the Search Quality Rater Guidelines. They cannot affect individual sites' rankings, and nothing in their guidelines is itself a ranking factor.
Documented in
Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines define main content as any part of the page that directly helps it achieve its purpose, including text, images, videos, page features such as calculators and content created by users, and they count the title at the top of the page as part of it.
Google Search Quality Rater Guidelines (PDF, 11 September 2025) · Day 2 · Understanding what's on a page
Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines say navigation links are a common type of supplementary content, and that content behind tabs and user reviews or comments may count as main content on some pages and as supplementary content on others, depending on the page's purpose.
Google Search Quality Rater Guidelines (PDF, 11 September 2025) · Day 2 · Understanding what's on a page
Google's How Search Works page says that in a side-by-side experiment search quality raters see two sets of results, one with the proposed change and one without, and are asked which they prefer and why.
Google Search (How Search Works) · Day 3 · How Google thinks about Quality
Google's helpful-content guidance lists effort, originality, talent or skill and accuracy as the main-content attributes search quality raters are trained to evaluate, and says using generative AI to produce large amounts of text without manual oversight or curation represents little to no effort.
Google Search Central · Day 3 · How Google thinks about Quality
Google's 2019 post on core updates says Google tests any broad core update before it goes live, including feedback from its search quality raters, whose data is not used directly in ranking.
Search Central blog (1 August 2019) · Day 3 · What are quality updates
Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines (September 2025) list fake owner or content creator profiles, such as made-up author profiles with AI-generated images, as deception, and say pages using deception of any type should be rated Lowest.
Google Search Quality Rater Guidelines (PDF, 11 September 2025) · Day 3 · Wrapping all up: AI, Search, and making sense of everything.
Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines say no single rating can directly change how a page appears in Google Search; ratings measure how well search works and give examples of helpful and unhelpful results to improve it.
Google Search Quality Rater Guidelines (PDF, 11 September 2025) · Day 3 · Wrapping all up: AI, Search, and making sense of everything.
Google updated its generative AI content guidance on 1 October 2026 with information from the Search Quality Rater Guidelines, to keep its documentation in sync with the presentations used at its developer events.
Google Search Central · Day 3 · Wrapping all up: AI, Search, and making sense of everything.
Slide and stage claims that name it, the ones Google’s documentation does not cover first.
Google's quality talk said search quality raters can be employed by other search engines too, not just by Google.
Google sometimes couples a core update with an update to its Search Quality Rater Guidelines.
Gary Illyes pointed to Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines as the detailed source on how Google thinks about the main content of a page.
Gary Illyes · Day 2 · Understanding what's on a page
Google's quality talk stressed that nothing in the Search Quality Rater Guidelines is itself a ranking factor; the guidelines explain how Google thinks about quality.
Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines point out that the tool used to create content is not the problem, but how it was used and what for.
Gary Illyes · Day 3 · Wrapping all up: AI, Search, and making sense of everything.
Google's slide pointed to the Search Quality Rater Guidelines at goo.gle/raters-guidelines, with a QR code to the guidelines PDF, and the speaker said this is the exact document Google's raters use.
Google's slide said search quality raters are independent reviewers who help Google decide whether a change it is about to launch is good for users.
Google's slide said search quality raters cannot affect the rankings of individual sites.
Google's slide said Google gives its search quality raters guidelines that describe how Google thinks about quality.
The rater guidelines' table of contents shown on Google's slide covers page quality rating, YMYL topics, main and supplementary content, website and creator reputation, E-E-A-T and lowest quality pages.
Google's quality talk said search quality raters are external to Google, not Google employees.
Google's quality talk pointed to page 21 of the Search Quality Rater Guidelines for its definition of content quality by effort, originality, talent or skill and accuracy, noting that the document is updated from time to time.
Google's quality talk said effort, in the rater guidelines, is the extent to which a human being actively worked to create satisfying content, and that effort can be direct or indirect.
Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines tell raters that any form of deception makes a page untrustworthy and earns it the lowest rating.
Gary Illyes · Day 3 · Wrapping all up: AI, Search, and making sense of everything.
Quality raters cannot give a site a penalty or a manual action; their ratings are converted into labels that Google uses to improve its algorithms.
Gary Illyes · Day 3 · Wrapping all up: AI, Search, and making sense of everything.
Use the rater guidelines as a description of what Google's ranking systems aim to reward, not as a checklist of ranking factors: rater scores evaluate Google's changes and are not used to rank any particular site.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 3 · How Google thinks about Quality
The talk's originality test ('are you adding more value') matches Google's helpful-content question on content that draws on other sources, while the rater guidelines ask raters, where other websites have similar content, to consider whether the page is the original source; aim to be the original source, and add substantial value where you build on others.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 3 · How Google thinks about Quality
Kit items about Search quality raters: their own words name it, or several of the claims they rest on do.
Publish AI-generated text, images and markup only after human review, and show only real authors
Rests on 11 claims, 3 of them naming Search quality raters; its own words name Search quality raters
Wrap each page's primary content in one clearly delimited main area
Rests on 14 claims, 2 of them naming Search quality raters
Also inglossary terms Search quality raters, Content quality (effort, originality, talent or skill, accuracy), E-E-A-T
Things named in the same claim, with the number of claims they share.