Knowledge base v2.13.0 · Community edition · data through 2 October 2026
Day 3 · Friday 2 October 2026 · 11:15
The speaker is not named on the slides or in the recording.
Google's slide said there is not one single ranking system and named spam detection systems, the reviews system, BERT, MUM, RankBrain, freshness systems, deduplication systems, crisis information systems and link analysis systems (PageRank).
“There’s not one single ranking system...”
Wording checked against the slide or recording
Speaker GoogleEvidence slide photo, transcript
Google's slide said that in 2023 Google ran 719,326 search quality tests, 124,942 side-by-side experiments and 16,871 live traffic experiments, and made 4,781 launches to Search.
Speaker GoogleEvidence 2 slide photos
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.
Speaker GoogleEvidence slide photo, transcript
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.
Speaker GoogleEvidence slide photo, transcript
Used byglossary term Search quality raters
Google's slide said search quality raters cannot affect the rankings of individual sites.
“They can not affect individual site's rankings.”
Wording checked against the slide or recording
Speaker GoogleEvidence slide photo
Used byglossary term Search quality raters
Google's slide said Google gives its search quality raters guidelines that describe how Google thinks about quality.
Speaker GoogleEvidence slide photo
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.
Speaker GoogleEvidence slide photo
Google's quality talk described quality as a ranking signal in its own right: a number calculated from many different parts (the word 'quality' is a repaired speech-to-text reading).
Speaker GoogleEvidence transcript
Google's quality talk said quality is one of the most important ranking signals, although Google uses hundreds of ranking signals (the word 'quality' is a repaired speech-to-text reading).
Speaker GoogleEvidence transcript
Google's quality talk defined content quality as the extent to which a human being put effort, originality, talent, skill and accuracy into creating the content.
“Quality is basically the extent to which a human being put effort, originality, talent, skill, and accuracy into creating content.”
Speaker GoogleEvidence transcript
Used byglossary term Content quality (effort, originality, talent or skill, accuracy)
Google's quality talk said quality is part of the core systems and signals that go into Google's algorithm, which Google calls ranking systems.
Speaker GoogleEvidence transcript
Google's quality talk called PageRank the speaker's favourite ranking system, elegant in its time, but said Google does not really use it so much anymore.
“My favorite is probably PageRank, even though we don't really use them so much anymore.”
Speaker GoogleEvidence transcript
Google's quality talk named the spam systems among Google's ranking systems and said site owners probably interact a lot with the freshness systems, the reviews system and other ranking systems.
Speaker GoogleEvidence slide photo, transcript
Google's quality talk pointed site owners to Google's published guide to its Search ranking systems to learn what each system does.
Speaker GoogleEvidence transcript
Google's quality talk said Google's ranking systems change over time.
Speaker GoogleEvidence transcript
Google's quality talk said ranking signals differ by result type: for web pages they include the text on the page, links and passages, while for news, probably, freshness, diversity and originality become more important.
Speaker GoogleEvidence transcript
Google's quality talk warned that trying to maximise one ranking signal does not work, because Google uses hundreds of ranking signals.
“Big takeaway: always remember, there's hundreds of ranking signals.”
Speaker GoogleEvidence transcript
Google's quality talk said users expect a richer set of results than ever, so Google brings different result types, such as web pages and videos, for different queries and intents.
Speaker GoogleEvidence transcript
Google's quality talk said Google sometimes gives direct answers, and that for a query such as directions to the airport it should also show Maps features.
Speaker GoogleEvidence transcript
Google's quality talk said that at any moment thousands of Search experiments are probably running.
Speaker GoogleEvidence transcript
Google's quality talk said Google designs its ranking systems to identify the information people are most likely to find useful and reliable.
Speaker GoogleEvidence transcript
Google's quality talk said side-by-side experiments compare a proposed change with what is already in production; its hypothetical example was rewriting a page's title with AI and checking whether the result is better than the current one.
Speaker GoogleEvidence transcript
Used byglossary term Side-by-side and live traffic experiments
Google's quality talk said experiments are judged on hundreds of metrics, and a change that does well enough is then run on very small slices of live traffic.
Speaker GoogleEvidence transcript
Google's quality talk said only changes whose live traffic experiments look even better, or exceed expectations on the metrics, become launches.
Speaker GoogleEvidence transcript
Google's quality talk said a change to Search cannot simply be launched: it must first be shown to move the metrics in a way that benefits users.
Speaker GoogleEvidence transcript
Google's quality talk said search quality raters are external to Google, not Google employees.
Speaker GoogleEvidence transcript
Used byglossary term Search quality raters
Google's quality talk said search quality raters can be employed by other search engines too, not just by Google.
Speaker GoogleEvidence transcript
Google's quality talk said raters rate results and their ranking for a change, decide whether the change is good or bad, and explain why they chose their rating.
Speaker GoogleEvidence transcript
Google's quality talk showed five self-assessment questions (slide not photographed) that site owners can use to evaluate their own content, such as whether it is people-first or made mainly for search engines, and whether the author is an expert on the topic.
Speaker GoogleEvidence transcript
Google's quality talk said rater ratings are used to measure how effectively search engines deliver helpful content to people around the world.
Speaker GoogleEvidence transcript
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.
Speaker GoogleEvidence transcript, slide photo
Used byglossary term Search quality raters
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.
Speaker GoogleEvidence transcript
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.
Speaker GoogleEvidence transcript
Google's quality talk said originality means offering content that is not available on any other website or, where similar content exists elsewhere, adding more value to it.
Speaker GoogleEvidence transcript
Google's quality talk said talent or skill means content created with enough talent and skill to give users a satisfying experience.
Speaker GoogleEvidence transcript
Google's quality talk said content has to be accurate, and that accuracy matters most for YMYL topics and health topics.
Speaker GoogleEvidence transcript
Google's quality talk contrasted a commodity article, 'Top 10 things to consider when buying running shoes', with a non-commodity one, a wear pattern analysis of why certain running shoes collapse after 400 miles (slide not photographed).
Speaker GoogleEvidence transcript
Google's quality talk said commodity content is based on very common knowledge, could have been written by anyone and usually offers very little insight or additional value.
Speaker GoogleEvidence transcript
Used byglossary term Commodity content
Google's quality talk said non-commodity content offers a unique, experienced take, and advised writing content that readers will find very helpful and reliable.
Speaker GoogleEvidence transcript
Used byglossary term Commodity content
Google's quality talk said its article examples were illustrations, not a recipe: writing exactly that article is no guarantee that it will work.
Speaker GoogleEvidence transcript
Google's quality talk said that in 2026 it is easy for anyone to create a large amount of commodity content, and encouraged attendees to try it once to see what the result looks like.
Speaker GoogleEvidence transcript
Google's quality talk said AI is now everywhere and available to everyone, and that opinions differ on how the broad use of AI has affected search results.
Speaker GoogleEvidence transcript
Google's quality talk presented its AI-content examples as the speaker's personal opinion, not as the position of Google's search quality systems.
Speaker GoogleEvidence transcript
Google's quality talk called AI just a tool and asked how users would know whom to trust if AI lets anyone appear to be the absolute expert in a field.
Speaker GoogleEvidence transcript
Google's quality talk asked why users would read AI-generated content when they could ask an LLM the same questions directly.
Speaker GoogleEvidence transcript
Google's quality talk showed a surface-level example article (not photographed) that the speaker said Gemini could have generated, while stressing that humans have written such content for a long time too.
Speaker GoogleEvidence transcript
Google's quality talk asked what would happen to the web ecosystem if everyone used AI to flood the web with surface-level content like the example it had just shown.
Speaker GoogleEvidence transcript
Google's quality talk said that with LLMs anyone can write a top-10 shoe review without using the products, and questioned whether such reviews provide any real value.
Speaker GoogleEvidence transcript
Google's quality talk said quality problems should be treated as quality issues, not as AI versus human content, because a lot of good AI-assisted or AI-written content exists.
“it's very important to think about these quality issues as quality issues and not AI versus human content.”
Speaker GoogleEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-SPM-05
Google's quality talk said good content can be created for literally any vertical, answering site owners who say they do not know how to become experts or make their content stand out.
Speaker GoogleEvidence transcript
Google's quality talk showed, as an example of strong content, a running-shoe review site that cut the shoes apart, examined the upper and the foam density under a microscope, took high-quality images, built a test rig and created its own metrics to compare shoes (site not named, slide not photographed).
Speaker GoogleEvidence transcript
Google's quality talk said the speaker believes content in any vertical can go very far when its creators invest in their own knowledge, effort and expertise.
Speaker GoogleEvidence transcript
Google's quality talk said Google discovers tens of billions of spam pages every day.
Speaker GoogleEvidence transcript
Google's quality talk said a big portion of the new pages Google discovers every day is spam, adding that the speaker did not know of Google ever publishing the percentage.
Speaker GoogleEvidence transcript
Google's quality talk said spam systems are one of the ways Google protects search quality, removing a very large amount of spam before results are served.
Speaker GoogleEvidence transcript
Google's quality talk said Google had released four spam updates in 2026 by the time of the talk on 2 October, with one still rolling out.
Speaker GoogleEvidence transcript
Google's quality talk said its spam updates mostly target spam pages, so most site owners in the audience were probably not affected.
Speaker GoogleEvidence transcript
Used byglossary term Spam update
Google's quality talk said evaluating the quality of the web at scale is messy and hard, and that Google's work on it is never done.
Speaker GoogleEvidence transcript
Google's quality talk said AI has fundamentally changed how Google builds spam updates, letting it evaluate many more candidates and drastically increasing its velocity, so it launches faster with more impact.
Speaker GoogleEvidence transcript
Google's quality talk said AI lets Google catch new types of spam and catch more of it.
Speaker GoogleEvidence transcript
Google's quality talk listed recent updates to Google's spam policies: back button hijacking, scaled content abuse and manipulating AI responses.
Speaker GoogleEvidence transcript
Used byrequirements DEV-SPM-01, DEV-SPM-02
Google's quality talk said back button hijacking was added after many user complaints about pressing the back button and landing on an auto-generated page, or staying on the same site after pressing it twice.
Speaker GoogleEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-SPM-01glossary term Back button hijacking
Google's quality talk said Google clarified that traditional spam techniques aimed at manipulating AI responses also violate its spam policies, and that Google can take action against them.
Speaker GoogleEvidence transcript
Google's quality talk said Google reads spam reports and uses them to decide what kinds of spam to tackle next.
Speaker GoogleEvidence transcript
Google's quality talk said Google receives a lot of feedback at conferences and online, and invited attendees to share the quality issues they run into or want Google to work on next.
Speaker GoogleEvidence transcript
Google's ranking systems guide says PageRank, one of its core ranking systems when Google first launched, has evolved a lot since then and continues to be part of its core ranking systems.
Publisher Google Search Central
Used byglossary term PageRank and BackRub
Google's How Search Works page says a live traffic experiment first enables a feature for a small percentage of people, usually starting at 0.1%, and compares them with a control group on a very long list of metrics, such as clicks, number of queries, abandoned queries and time to click.
Publisher Google Search (How Search Works)
Used byglossary term Side-by-side and live traffic experiments
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.
Publisher Google Search (How Search Works)
Used byglossary term Side-by-side and live traffic experiments
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.
Publisher Google Search Central
Used byrequirement DEV-SPM-02glossary term Content quality (effort, originality, talent or skill, accuracy)
Google's guide to optimizing for generative AI features contrasts commodity content, such as '7 Tips for First-Time Homebuyers', with non-commodity content that gives unique expert or experienced takes beyond common knowledge, such as a first-hand account of waiving a home inspection.
Publisher Google Search Central
Used byglossary term Commodity content
Google's helpful-content guidance says product reviews build trust when readers understand how many products were tested, what the test results were and how the tests were conducted, with evidence of the work such as photographs.
Publisher Google Search Central
Google's Search Status Dashboard says the September 2026 spam update began on 24 September 2026, applies globally to all languages and may take up to two weeks to roll out.
Publisher Google Search Status Dashboard (Ranking incident history), Google Search Status Dashboard (September 2026 spam update)
Google announced on 13 April 2026 that back button hijacking is an explicit violation of its malicious practices spam policy, with enforcement from 15 June 2026; pages that do it may get manual spam actions or automated demotions.
Publisher Search Central blog (13 April 2026), Google Search Central
Used byrequirement DEV-SPM-01glossary term Back button hijacking
Google's back button hijacking announcement says some instances may come from a site's included libraries or advertising platform, and asks site owners to remove or disable any code, imports or configurations responsible.
Publisher Search Central blog (13 April 2026)
Used byrequirement DEV-SPM-01
Since April 2026 Google's spam report page says Google may use a report to take manual action, and that the submission text is sent to the site owner, so reports containing personally identifying information are not processed.
Publisher Google Search Central
The quality talk's slide listed MUM among Google's ranking systems, while Google's ranking systems guide says MUM is not currently used for general ranking in Search; read the slide as a list of systems Google runs, not as proof that each one ranks every query.
Author Ibrahim Anjro
The remark that PageRank is not used so much anymore differs from Google's ranking systems guide, which says PageRank has evolved a lot and continues to be part of the core ranking systems; read it as PageRank weighing less among many signals, not as PageRank being switched off, so links still matter.
Author Ibrahim Anjro
For content and development teams: plan improvements across content quality, internal links, page experience and freshness together; a project that pushes a single metric, such as keyword density or one link score, matches what Google said does not work.
Author Ibrahim Anjro
Two Day 3 slides headed 'In 2023' gave Google's testing figures in two versions: exact in the quality talk (719,326 search quality tests, 4,781 launches) and rounded in the updates talk (800,000+ tests, 4,700+ launches). Google's How Search Works page states the exact 719,326 and 4,781, so cite those with the year 2023; 800,000+ matches no figure on that page, although the page's three test counts (719,326 quality tests, 124,942 side-by-side and 16,871 live traffic experiments) add up to 861,139.
Author Ibrahim Anjro
Google made 4,781 launches to Search in 2023 while its status dashboard lists nine named ranking updates that year, so almost every change to Search goes unannounced; monitor rankings and traffic continuously, not only around announced core or spam updates.
Author Ibrahim Anjro
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.
Author Ibrahim Anjro
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.
Author Ibrahim Anjro
For editorial teams, the test for an AI-assisted article is the same as for any article: whether it adds effort, originality, skill and accuracy beyond what an LLM would answer directly; disclosure of AI use alone neither saves nor sinks a page.
Author Ibrahim Anjro
For content teams: turn reviews into non-commodity content by testing the products yourselves, publishing your own photos and measurements, explaining the test method and defining comparable metrics across products; a list of common buying tips is the commodity version.
Author Ibrahim Anjro
The spoken 'tens of billions of spam pages' a day matches Google's How Search Works page, which says its systems find 40 billion spammy pages every day, and the later Day 3 slide '40B spammy pages detected every day' (under 'In 2023'); cite 40 billion a day.
Author Ibrahim Anjro
For development teams: test that the browser back button returns users from your pages to where they came from, including search results; audit scripts that call the History API, insert interstitial or 'recommended' pages, or come from ad and engagement vendors.
Author Ibrahim Anjro
Used byrequirement DEV-SPM-01
Tactics sold as AI visibility or GEO, such as hidden text aimed at AI answers, mass-produced pages for fan-out queries or keyword-stuffed passages, are judged under the same spam policies as classic ranking manipulation.
Author Ibrahim Anjro
Used byrequirement DEV-SPM-02
On 1 October 2026, during the event, Google updated its generative AI content guide with rater-guideline material to keep its documentation in sync with its developer-event presentations, and the helpful-content page, updated the same day, carries the effort, originality, talent or skill and accuracy definitions from the quality talk; cite those pages rather than the talk.
Author Ibrahim Anjro
Google's quality talk said quality is one of the most important ranking signals, although Google uses hundreds of ranking signals (the word 'quality' is a repaired speech-to-text reading).
The same quality signal that Google uses at retrieval is also used in ranking when results are served.
The quality talk's slide listed MUM among Google's ranking systems, while Google's ranking systems guide says MUM is not currently used for general ranking in Search; read the slide as a list of systems Google runs, not as proof that each one ranks every query.
Google's ranking systems guide says MUM is not currently used for general ranking in Search, only for specific applications such as COVID-19 vaccine searches and featured snippet callouts.
Google's quality talk said that at any moment thousands of Search experiments are probably running.
Google said that even the classic ten-blue-links layout was settled only after millions of experiments, as part of using as much data as possible for product decisions.
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.
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.
Google's quality talk said non-commodity content offers a unique, experienced take, and advised writing content that readers will find very helpful and reliable.
Myth: build content for every possible consumer need. Google's answer: prioritise unique perspectives, expertise and in-depth experience that go beyond common knowledge.
Google's quality talk said AI has fundamentally changed how Google builds spam updates, letting it evaluate many more candidates and drastically increasing its velocity, so it launches faster with more impact.
Google uses more and more AI to detect spam, and Google's testing shows that this AI-based detection is highly accurate.
Google's quality talk said AI lets Google catch new types of spam and catch more of it.
Google uses more and more AI to detect spam, and Google's testing shows that this AI-based detection is highly accurate.
Google's quality talk said Google clarified that traditional spam techniques aimed at manipulating AI responses also violate its spam policies, and that Google can take action against them.
Google's guide says creating separate content for every variation of how people might search, including fan-out queries, primarily to manipulate rankings or AI responses violates its scaled content abuse policy. It adds that its AI systems can understand a page's relevance even without an exact match to the query.
Google's slide, headed 'In 2023, there were...', said 40 billion spammy pages are detected every day.
Google's quality talk said Google discovers tens of billions of spam pages every day.
Google sometimes couples a core update with an update to its Search Quality Rater Guidelines.
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.
Reviewing the spam slide, the speaker said link spam would probably be replaced with scaled content abuse as the spam type worth talking about today.
Google's quality talk listed recent updates to Google's spam policies: back button hijacking, scaled content abuse and manipulating AI responses.
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.
Google's slide said search quality raters cannot affect the rankings of individual sites.
Google's quality talk said ranking signals differ by result type: for web pages they include the text on the page, links and passages, while for news, probably, freshness, diversity and originality become more important.
Ranking signals differ by result type: web pages (text, links, passages), images (resolution, colour, associated text), news (freshness, originality, diversity), local (location, type, rating, reviews, hours) and videos (language, text from speech).
Google's quality talk said quality problems should be treated as quality issues, not as AI versus human content, because a lot of good AI-assisted or AI-written content exists.
Google said it is not really trying to tell AI-written from human-written content, because it cares more about the quality of content than about how it was created.
Google's slide said Google made more than 4,700 launches to Search in 2023; the speaker rounded this to close to 5,000.
Google's slide said that in 2023 Google ran 719,326 search quality tests, 124,942 side-by-side experiments and 16,871 live traffic experiments, and made 4,781 launches to Search.
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.
Google's quality talk said quality problems should be treated as quality issues, not as AI versus human content, because a lot of good AI-assisted or AI-written content exists.