---
title: "What are Search Quality Evaluators? The Humans Behind Your Position in Google Search"
url: "https://cmotimes.com/insight/what-are-search-quality-evaluators-the-humans-behind-your-position-in-google-search/"
author: "Natalka Antoniuk"
published: "2026-09-25"
updated: "2026-09-25"
---

# What are Search Quality Evaluators? The Humans Behind Your Position in Google Search

Most people think SEO is about appealing to bots. A cat and mouse game of improving technical site health, publishing blogs, adding keywords into on-page elements and gaining authoritative backlinks.

Imagine finding out, however many years later, that your content is actually being judged by humans. Google started using Search Quality Evaluators in 2005. Search Quality Evaluators have one job:

Judge whether a page satisfies users by assessing helpfulness, quality, trustworthiness, relevance and expertise.

That sounds a lot like E-E-A-T.

The score doesn’t necessarily influence how your page ranks in search results. But it is used to train the algorithm.

In April 2010 we had Google’s MayDay Update. An algorithmic update that changed how sites were ranked for long-tail queries. Panda, the update that effectively ended the content farm business model, began rolling out in February 2011. This one shocked the SEO industry, but it was just the beginning of Google’s push towards delivering a better search experience.

Websites are assessed on Page Quality (PQ) and Needs Met (NM), with detailed instructions outlined in a 182-page document – Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines.

### Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines

The [Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines](https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterhub.com/en/searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf) enable human assessors to rank a page from lowest to highest quality based on Google’s standards. The 182-page document outlines everything a human reviewer might need to judge a page fairly. This includes metrics such as:

- Overall page quality
- Effort
- Reputation
- E-E-A-T
- Meeting search user needs

The guidelines also differentiate between the Main Content (MC) and Supplementary Content (SC), stating raters should review page quality based on the MC alone. This is the content that directly helps the page achieve its purpose, including images, videos, text or interactive features.

SC typically supports user experience but doesn’t necessarily support the page’s objectives. This may include elements such as navigations, recommended products/articles, social share buttons or footer links. In some instances, it may include content within tabbed components or accordions.

This framework for assessing Page Quality and Needs Met has been in place since 2005, with approximately 16,000 independent reviewers worldwide. Their role is to score and test search results using the official Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines. You’ll find all the usual culprits in there (E-E-A-T, quality, duplication), as well as some useful insight into how Google assesses particular types of content.

In 2025, Google updated the guidelines for assessing page quality.

### What did Google Change in the Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines?

Between 2020 and 2025, Google added 7 additional pages to the Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines. On the surface, that doesn’t look like a lot. But looking at the language, it’s clear that Google have had some big shifts in what they deem as quality.

### Semantic Count:

| Word | 2020 | 2025 |
| --- | --- | --- |
| human | 3 | 13 |
| effort | 29 | 120 |
| reputation | 182 | 213 |
| purpose | 273 | 334 |
| intent | 424 | 326 |

### Effort

Clearly, the biggest change in Google’s PQ guidance is in effort. The word usage increased 314% in 5 years, highlighting how hard Google are fighting to combat scaled content abuse.

In the Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines, the word ‘effort’ is used 120 times. To assess quality on effort alone, Search Quality Evaluators are asked to consider the extent to which a human being actively worked to create satisfying content.

At this point, it’s worth noting that Google have not directly called out AI-generated content as being a sign of low quality. In fact, they don’t throughout the entire document labelling generative AI as a ‘helpful tool for content creation’ but warning that it can be misused. Instead, they ask evaluators to think about how much time a human has spent creating the page.

One example of a page scored with lowest quality. The explanation of the Page Quality rating states:

“It is unlikely a human author would make these odd statements and obvious mistakes. It's likely this content was auto-generated with no human editing.”

### Reputation

Reputation was also given more prominence, with a 17% increase in usage over the 5 years. Search Quality Raters are told to look at external, independent sources such as news and reviews. Google’s guidelines suggest raters should focus on the author of the content, not the owner of the website.

This won’t be surprising to SEOs. It didn’t take long for users to recognise client logos, testimonials and embedded review logos as trustwashing. Today, these signals come from UGC. Real human opinions talking about brands or products, without backlinks or hidden agendas.

In practice, this means the search space is no longer an SEO tapping away at their laptop. To get results in Google, search engine marketing must integrate digital PR, PPC, client services, social media and product teams.

### Intent

The one element Google is deprioritising is intent, with a 23% drop in the word usage. This doesn’t mean matching search intent is any less important (a blog with a sales CTA is still unlikely to rank for an informational keyword cluster). It does mean Google has got better at measuring this itself. Twenty years of PQ and NM scores have refined how intent signalling is measured. But the key turning point was GA4.

GA4 officially rolled out in October 2020 but didn’t replace universal analytics until 2023. One of the main benefits was the embedded predictive AI insights to fill in data gaps when users didn’t accept cookies. This didn’t just support website owners but gave Google a better understanding of how users engage with content (and whether it matched intent).

### The Biggest Change: YMYL Content

In the March and May updates, some sites didn’t notice an impact at all. Others saw it almost immediately. As we know, this was another quality update. Google is always vague when it comes to exactly what they implemented, but we know from our data where they focussed their efforts. YMYL content.

YMYL (your money your life) content is a page or piece of content about a topic that can affect a person’s health, money, safety or well-being. It’s always been a key area of focus when it comes to algorithm changes due to the impact poor quality YMYL content can have on someone’s life.

Websites in this niche recorded [ranking drops of up to 35% almost overnight](https://www.lucidmedia.co.nz/blog/google-march-april-2026-core-updates/). From a user perspective, it’s nice to know that Google are prioritising quality in the areas that have the most impact on my life. From an SEO perspective, this is foreshadowing what we can expect from future updates and where we need to shift our focus to stay on top.

### Generalists

The biggest shift seen in the updated Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines was a growth in effort and in reputation. Generalist websites tend to recycle content from lots of sources, never demonstrating either of those factors. Furthermore, the sites that published blogs just for the sake of getting something live aren’t seen as authorities in the YMYL space they operate in.

You could even blame the SEOs for publishing content purely to capture the keywords. Without real-world experience behind the narrative, or proof that this page was created by a person with an expert understanding of the topic, the page is unlikely to maintain its rank.

### Aggregator and AI Penalties

Generative AI tools have made content production easy and fast. In turn, this has increased the number of new pages getting published every minute – and Google is taking a stand.

Whilst stating they don’t actively penalise sites that use AI-generated content, these were the pages that took the biggest hit. There were [global traffic declines of up to 80% in the YMYL space](https://www.reddit.com/r/digital_marketing/comments/1sugn27/march_2026_google_core_update_were_seeing_80/) following the March and May updates.

AI-generated content does not demonstrate expertise; it synthesises an answer based on the information available to it. Without human input, it’s impossible to embed E-E-A-T signals into your writing.

### How to Adapt Your SEO Strategy

If you’ve been following Google’s advice for years, your current strategy is probably in pretty good shape. Focussing on content quality over quantity and building strong entity signals into your domain and digital footprint is still the right thing to do.

However, if you were impacted by either of the last two spam updates then these should be your next steps:

- Build a map of the pages that lost visibility. This might immediately highlight whether it was a specific topic or page group that was impacted.
- Map your E-E-A-T signals **per topic**. We’re not optimising isolated pages anymore; search engines are looking for strong expertise, experience, authority and trustworthiness signals about your brand and the topic you are trying to rank for.
- Update any AI-generated content to include real experiences, such as case study examples or accreditations. These prove the human effort behind the page, even if you did use AI to help you create it.
- Focus on topical depth and genuine authority, not generic catch-all content. In an age where Google and AI are citing experts, you must prove you are the source of truth.

---

Natalka Antoniuk is Digital Marketing Lead at [Appius](https://www.appius.com) and a content strategist with 10 years’ experience in SEO and organic growth. She has written 200+ bylined articles across national press and industry publications, including G2, and her work spans marketing, business, events, and property. Natalka’s content career began with her award-winning property blog, I Want to Buy a House, which she later sold to pursue content professionally. She is a Semrush Ambassador and holds degrees in Advertising and International Hospitality Management.