What is the Google Search Quality Rater Guidelines document?
Google employs thousands of contracted evaluators around the world to look at search results and rate them. The Quality Rater Guidelines are the manual they work from: a long document, well over a hundred pages, that explains how to judge a page's quality and how well a result meets the need behind a query. Google publishes it, updates it every year or so and treats it as the clearest public statement of what it wants search to reward.
The document introduces most of the vocabulary that search professionals now use. Page Quality ratings run from lowest to highest. Needs Met ratings judge whether a result satisfies the query. E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, the qualities raters look for in a page and its author. YMYL, or your money or your life, marks the topics where a bad answer can hurt someone, such as health, finance, law and safety, and where the bar is set highest.
The ratings do not change the ranking of the page that was rated. They are used to test changes to Google's algorithms: a proposed update is run, raters judge the before and after, and the aggregate tells Google whether the change made results better by its own definition.
Why it matters
Why the Quality Rater Guidelines matter
The guidelines are the nearest thing to a public specification of what Google is trying to do. The ranking systems are secret, but the target they are tuned toward is written down, and anyone who makes content for the web can read it. When Google adds a concept to the guidelines, such as the extra E for experience added in late 2022, it is signaling what its systems will increasingly try to detect.
For brands the document is a useful audit. It describes what a trustworthy page looks like: a clear author, a reason to believe them, accurate main content, an honest purpose, a site that says who runs it. It also describes what the lowest ratings go to, including pages made to deceive, pages with no real content and pages that could harm. Reading it is a fast way to see your own site as a stranger would.
In practice
How the Quality Rater Guidelines work in practice
- 01
Raters receive tasks: a query, a location, sometimes a device, and a set of results. For each result they research the site and its reputation, read the main content, judge whether the page does what it claims and assign ratings on the scales the guidelines define. Their work is aggregated and compared across proposed algorithm changes, and it feeds the training and evaluation of Google's systems.
- 02
For a content team the practical use is to write and publish to the standard the guidelines describe. Name the author and say why they are credible. Show real experience of the subject rather than a summary of other summaries. Keep the main content substantial and the ads and distractions out of its way. Make it easy to find who runs the site and how to contact them. On YMYL topics, cite sources and get the facts checked. None of this is a trick; it is the behavior the guidelines were written to reward.
Watch out
What people get wrong about the Quality Rater Guidelines
Thinking raters rank websites, when their ratings test algorithm changes and never move an individual page. Treating E-E-A-T as a score that can be added, when it is a description of qualities an algorithm tries to approximate. Reading the guidelines once in 2015 and assuming nothing changed, when the document has been revised many times and now addresses topics it did not then, including generated content. Ignoring the YMYL distinction and applying the strictest standard to a page about sneakers. And skipping the document altogether because it is long, when it is the only public account of the target.
