Quick, put on your raincoat…
There’s been a huge leak: Over 14,000 Search ranking factors were discovered in 2,500+ pages of Google’s API documentation.
Obviously there’s a lot here—more than we can cover in a feature. But here’s what you should know:
- The most recent date referenced is August 2023.
- The documentation does not include the weight of each ranking factor, unfortunately.
- However, Google does use click data to weight links in Search results, and it has three categories for determining link quality.
Is this documentation legit? It seems like it. Apparently the documents were accidentally included in a code review and pushed live. Oops.
If you do SEO, and you’ve been confused about whether or not to trust Google’s ranking guidelines, definitely read the full post and the top takeaways here.
And that’s not all: We also have early data on AI Overviews (AIOs).
AIOs have appeared in 42% of health-related queries compared to 16% e-commerce queries.
Longer queries are more likely to trigger them, and they often appear alongside features like People also ask and featured snippets.
They usually cite 10 SERP results. Unfortunately, cited domains are getting 8.9% fewer clicks… which seems to confirm what we’ve worried about all along.
There’s a lot to unpack here, too. You can dig into the details here.
In the meantime, if you want to rank and drive traffic, keep focusing on search intent, quality content, and marketing best practices. Though you’re probably doing that already anyway…
