Video Transcript

Welcome back to another episode of Local Search Tuesdays. This week, I’m sharing details about Google’s update to the Quality Rater Guidelines, so stay tuned!

For those of you who don’t know, Google uses a group of human evaluators to crosscheck the quality of search results. Basically, they’re paid to check Google search results to see if the top-ranking sites actually deserve to be the top-ranking sites.

Every year, Google updates the Quality Rater Guidelines, a huge document used by the Quality Rater team to help judge whether a site should rank or not. The Guidelines aren’t a cheat sheet for SEO though. It’s more of a guide for what a quality website with good content should have.

Google hasn’t updated the guidelines since March of 2024, so it wasn’t surprising to see an update roll out last month. The new updates to the guidelines are mostly about how AI-generated content and spam play into the search ecosystem.

So here are the key updates that were made to this year’s version of Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines:

In section 2.1, titled “Important definitions”, Google has added in specific language about AI-generated content to provide better guidance to the raters about how to evaluate LLM content. Specifically, the definition says

“Generative AI is a type of machine learning (ML) model that can take what it has learned from the examples it has been provided to create new content, such as text, images, music, and code”

Some pretty big revisions were added to sections 4.0 through 4.6, including the addition of several new subsections on new types of spam and low-quality content. The guidelines list three areas of concern:

Expired domain abuse, where “an expired domain name is purchased and repurposed primarily to benefit the new website owner by hosting content that has little to no value to users.”

Site reputation abuse, where “third-party content is published on a host site mainly because of that host site’s already-established ranking signals, which it has earned primarily form its first-party content.”

And scaled content abuse, where “many pages are generated for the purpose of primarily benefitting the website owner and not helping users”

The big sticking point for AI-generated content is listed under scaled content abuse, and it reads “using automated tools (generative AI or otherwise) as a low-effort way to produce many pages that add little-to-no value for website visitors as compared to other pages on the web on the same topic”

Then in section 4.7, a few examples are provided to show how to identify and rate AI-generated content. In a section called “Lowest: scaled content abuse cancers”, the text reads:

“The contents of the page show it is created with generative AI with likely no original content and provides no value to users. For example, the article starts with ‘As a language model, I don’t have real-time data and my knowledge cutoff date is September 2021.’ The end of the text of the article appears to be cut off with an incomplete sentence ‘Pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors (NETs): Pancreatic NETs are a rare type of pancreatic cancer that can have a poor’”

There’s an interesting bit in there that tells the Quality Raters to turn off any ad blockers before rating sites. Google wants to be sure that the raters are seeing the same thing that people without ad blockers see.

So what does this all mean to you? It’s simple - if you want to rank well in search results, you need to add content to your site that truly helps your customers and potential customers. Your content needs to show expertise and authority. You should definitely not be using AI-generated content at scale. Only add content that truly answers real-world customer questions.

If you’d like to check out the Quality Rater Guidelines yourself, you can head to bit.ly/2025-quality-rater-update to check them out. 

That’s all the time we have left for this week’s episode, so you know what that means. Put your hand on the screen right here: We totally just high-fived ‘cause you learned something awesome. Thanks for watching, and we’ll see you again next week for another episode of Local Search Tuesdays.