The verdict
Google’s quality raters score search results to test its systems. Google says their ratings do not directly affect ranking and raters have no control over how pages rank. The guidelines are still worth reading, because they describe what Google is trying to reward. I use them as a trust checklist in audits, never as a list of ranking factors.
There is a steady supply of articles explaining how to “optimise for the quality raters”. The premise is that a person at Google will look at your site and mark it down. That is not what raters do, and Google has said so in writing more than once.
What raters actually do
Google works with external raters who score search results against a published set of guidelines. Google’s explanation of its testing is direct about what the scores are for: “These ratings do not directly impact ranking, but they do help us benchmark the quality of our results.”
Its guidance on helpful content, updated in October 2026, goes further: “Search raters have no control over how pages rank,” and “Rater data is not used directly in our ranking algorithms.”
So the raters grade Google, not you. If a change to the ranking systems makes the results worse by the guidelines’ standard, the raters’ scores show it.
Why the guidelines are still worth reading
Because they are the closest thing Google publishes to a description of what it is trying to reward. Google first published the full document in November 2015, when it ran to 160 pages, and it has been revised many times since.
The same helpful content guidance sets out the idea underneath it, experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust, and adds two lines worth knowing. “While E-E-A-T itself isn’t a specific ranking factor”, and of the four, “trust is most important.”
How I use them in an audit
- Who is responsible for this page? On one clinic site I audited, the blog carried a post summarising forum chatter about a treatment, with no author and no clinician named. That is health content published by nobody. The guidelines ask who stands behind a page, and on a clinical page the answer has to be a person.
- Can a stranger check the business is real? A named person, a real address, a phone number that reaches somebody, credentials that can be verified. A criminal defence firm cannot publish client testimony, but it can publish bar admissions and courts.
- Why does this page exist? If the honest answer is “to rank”, that is the page I would look at first. It is usually the one dragging the rest down.
- Is the stake high? Health, legal and money pages are held to a higher standard in the guidelines. Most of the businesses I work with are in exactly those categories.
What I would not do
Treat “add E-E-A-T” as a task. An author box with a stock photo and a paragraph of adjectives is not trust. It is decoration that reads as filler, because it is.
And never invent it. Made-up credentials, a reviewer who never reviewed anything, a “medically reviewed” badge on a page no clinician read. On the pages where trust matters most, that is the fastest way to lose it with the people you are trying to reach, whatever any system does about it.
The raters are one of several things about how Google judges pages that are now on the record. The rest is in what the antitrust trial and the leak put on the record about ranking.
The short version
- Raters grade Google, not you. Their scores do not directly affect ranking.
- The guidelines describe what Google wants to reward. That makes them useful.
- E-E-A-T is not a ranking factor in itself. Trust is the part that matters most.
- Use them as an audit checklist. Who, can it be checked, why does it exist.
- Health, legal and money pages carry more weight.
- Never fake it. Invented credentials cost more than they could earn.
If a site should be ranking and it isn’t, that’s the work I do. If you want a second opinion on whether a site looks trustworthy to the people deciding whether to call you, that’s part of SEO consulting.
