In this series
RESONEO ·
Every blue link reaches the SERP carrying a set of data: the quality score of its site section (its subdomain, or its YouTube channel), its authority on the query’s topic, the originality its citations earn it and, for first-hand content, a “human voice” flag. This data follows it to display and into AI Overviews and AI Mode answers.
It is how the “hidden gems” Google promised with its helpful content system (launched with the HCU) come up: on a long-tail query, a small specialist site or a forum thread outranks a large general site. We found it in Google’s code, then checked it against the 2024 leak and the US antitrust trial.
Real SERPs · google.com, United States, November 11, 2026
Broad query
bike maintenance
Long-tail query
adjust 12 speed derailleur
The data Google attaches to each result
NsrSitechunkSignals TopicAuthorityTwiddlerDocFeatures CitationBasedOriginality HumanVoiceResultInfo TUTORIAL · REPAIR · AUTHENTICITYOn google.com, for [bike maintenance], Google puts REI, the outdoor retail chain, first. For [adjust 12 speed derailleur], REI drops off page one in favor of topic specialists: a bike repair subreddit (r/bikewrench), a site dedicated to electronic shifting (BetterShifting), a kids’ bike brand (Prevelo Bikes), then the two derailleur makers, Shimano and SRAM.
Google’s code shows why: each result reaches the SERP with its scores, and those scores give a small publisher five advantages over a large one.
In May 2023, Google promised more “hidden gems”, the nuggets tucked away in a forum thread, a little-known blog or an expert’s article. A year later, the 2024 leak revealed the scores Google assigns to each site: its quality per section, its topical focus, a promotion of small personal sites.
HJ Kim developed NavBoost and started Google Search’s page quality team. On a February 2025 call, whose notes were filed in Google’s antitrust trial, he describes the high-level components of a page’s score: topicality (is the page about the topic?), NavBoost (the memory of clicks) and quality (can it be trusted?).
Our finding
When Google assembles a results page, each result travels with data that stays with it until display. The 2024 leak showed these scores stored with the page in the index; Google’s code shows them travelling with the result after ranking, and the site section’s score appears all the way into the logs of SERP blocks. We keep twelve, out of more than 500 possible, grouped under four questions.
A blue link
What Google attaches to each result
The 2024 leak showed these scores stored with the page in the index.
Google’s code shows these scores travelling with the result after ranking.
The twiddlers rework the order. A site’s score stays attached to each of its pages, available to every step that follows ranking.
The site section’s score appears all the way into the logs of SERP blocks.
When magi, the AI behind these answers, picks its sources, it has the site section’s score, the authority on the topic and the citations received from other pages at hand.
The terms that sum it up, its category (tutorial, forum, YMYL…) and the type of domain.
SalientTermSetContainer the terms that sum up the page, drawn from content, anchors and clicksDocumentIntentScores its categories according to Orbit, Google’s page classifier (tutorial, forum, YMYL…), with their scoreDomainClassification the type of domainThe quality score of its site section, and what pushes it down or flags it: a demotion, a hacked site, a risk of disinformation.
NsrSitechunkSignals the NSR quality score of its site sectionScoringBundle the document’s bundle of scores used in rankingFringeQueryPriorPerDocData the probability, when this page shows up, that the query is “fringe” (Google’s word for low-quality disinformation)DemotedResult the demotion a twiddler applies to the resultHackedsitesResultAnnotation the hacked-site annotation behind the SERP’s “This site may be hacked” warningThe citations it receives from other pages and its authority data.
AuthorityData authority data, for the twiddlers to useCitationBasedOriginality the page’s originality, measured through citationsFirst-hand content, a human voice, and the quality of a forum discussion.
HumanVoiceResultInfo the “human voice” flag of first-hand contentUgcPageQualityData the quality of a forum or discussion pageA site’s score stays attached to each of its pages, available to every step that follows ranking: the twiddlers that rework the order (our Twiddlers infographic), the assembly of SERP blocks, then AI answers.
For AI Search
The results that feed AI Overviews and AI Mode arrive in this same format, with the same data: when magi, the AI behind these answers, picks its sources, it has the site section’s score, the authority on the topic and the citations received from other pages at hand; our AI Overviews and AI Mode infographic details what the AI reads before it answers.
The sources cited in the answer have their own model. magi runs a BERT model, separate from the LLM, that scores the importance of each cited source, with one version for AI Mode and one for languages other than English.
The model that scores cited sources
MAGI_NONLLM_BERT_CITATION_IMPORTANCE the model for magi’s answers…_AIM its AI Mode version…_I18N its version for languages other than EnglishAdvantage 1 of 5: lived experience
On May 10, 2023, as it announced the Perspectives filter, Google promised that its helpful content system would show more first-hand and expert content:
Google, May 10, 2023Helpful information can often live in unexpected or hard-to-find places: a comment in a forum thread, a post on a little-known blog, or an article with unique expertise on a topic. Our helpful content ranking system will soon show more of these “hidden gems” on Search […]Learn from others’ experiences with more perspectives on Search
The 2024 leak showed a site-level score, the promotion of small personal sites. Google’s code shows the pipeline that goes looking for this content, under the name Google gives it: human voices. A fast retrieval is dedicated to it, and a separate search flow goes looking for authentic posts.
Each result then carries a flag that says whether it counts as a human voice, and RankLab, the set of Google Search ranking signals, has human voices signals for the query and for each result: ranking knows whether the query calls for human voices and whether a result is one.
The 2024 leakScore of small personal site promotionQualityNsrNsrData
A forum result also carries the quality of its discussion. The leak already showed Google scoring the quality of UGC pages (ugcDiscussionEffortScore, “UGC page quality signals”); Google’s code carries it all the way to the SERP.
The May 2023 post promised to make “authentic perspectives” easier to find. Upstream, Intent Brain, the Google Search system that estimates a query’s broad intents, has an AUTHENTICITY intent. It calls for the FORUMS result format and looks for the pages that Orbit, Google’s page classifier, put in the authentic category (our search intent infographic).
An authenticity twiddler then scores the query and each result. Another one, Natural Pearls, is the hidden gems twiddler, with its own signals for the query and for each result (see our Twiddlers infographic).
On the display side, Google has marked the “human voices” format deprecated and keeps the “forums” format: this content shows up under the name of the SERP’s Forums filter.
For a small site. First-hand accounts, hands-on reviews and forum threads get a separate retrieval on top of the usual one, with their own flag and signals. Google offers them, next to the large sites, when the user wants the view of someone who has been through it. To see them on a topic, add &udm=18 to a Google search URL: that is the Forums filter.
The human voices pipeline, in the code
HumanVoiceFastRetrievalRequestParams a fast retrieval dedicated to human voicesAuthenticPostSearchFlowParams a search flow for authentic postsHumanVoiceResultInfo the “human voice” flag set on each resultHumanVoiceRanklabResultInfo its ranking signals for the resultHumanVoiceRanklabResponseInfo its ranking signals for the queryNaturalPearlsTwiddlerQuerySignals · …ResultSignals the signals of Natural Pearls, the hidden gems twiddler, for the query and for each resultRESULT_FORMAT_ID_FORUMS the forums format, used by the authenticity and discussion intentsRESULT_FORMAT_ID_HUMAN_VOICES the human voices format, marked deprecatedsmallPersonalSite the small personal site promotion, scored for the site (leak)Advantage 2 of 5: authority on the topic
According to the call notes filed in the antitrust trial, quality belongs mostly to the site and changes little from one query to the next. They do describe one exception, the one in our opening example: on [adjust 12 speed derailleur], cycling specialists outrank REI, first on [bike maintenance].
Antitrust trial, notes of a call with a Google engineerHowever, in some cases Quality signal incorporates information from the query in addition to the static signal. For example, a site may have high quality but general information so a query interpreted as seeking very narrow/technical information may be used to direct to a quality site that is more technical.US antitrust trial exhibit PXR0356, call of February 18, 2025
Google’s code shows where the query comes in. There, topic authority is a twiddler, a program that adjusts the order after ranking: it combines page features with query features. The same site is therefore the authority on one query and not on the next. In our example, this twiddler works for BetterShifting, Prevelo Bikes and Shimano against the generalist.
In May 2023, Google described its “topic authority” system for news: it “looks at a variety of signals to understand the degree of expertise a publication has in particular areas” (Understanding news topic authority). It lists the three most prominent.
How notable a source is for a topic or location
Google’s systems spot the publications readers turn to for a topic or a town: a local paper for the news of its area.
Influence and original reporting
The system looks at how original reporting, from the publisher that broke it first, is cited by others: this is credit from citations.
Source reputation
A history of high-quality reporting, or recommendations from expert sources such as professional societies. For a news site, journalistic awards and a history of original reporting are “strong evidence” of a positive reputation.
Google gives an example: in a flood, the system brings to the top the publications of the region that regularly cover the town, even when large national outlets cover the event too. These signals are described for news; in the code, the topic authority twiddler’s features are among every result’s signals.
The 2024 leak revealed that Google computes an embedding for each page and one for the site, placed at the center of its pages’ embeddings. siteFocusScore says how much the site sticks to a single topic; siteRadius measures how far its pages stray from that center.
Google groups them under “quality authority topic embeddings”, the twiddler’s two words, topic and authority: topical embeddings serving an authority that is scored on the topic. A site tightly focused on cycling carries weight on bike repair queries.
The 2024 leakNumber denoting how much a site is focused on one topic.QualityAuthorityTopicEmbeddingsVersionedItem
In the code
siteFocusScore how focused the site is on a single topic (leak)siteRadius how far pages stray from the site’s topical center (leak)siteEmbedding · pageEmbedding the compressed site and page embeddings (leak)TopicAuthorityTwiddlerDocFeatures the document’s features, among each result’s signalsTopicAuthorityTwiddlerQueryFeatures the query’s features, among its signalsTopicAuthorityTwiddlerParams the topic authority twiddler’s settingsAuthorityData the authority data attached to each resultAdvantage 3 of 5: original information
The second authority signal Google highlights is influence: original information that other publishers pick up and cite. Credit goes to the page that published it first, whatever the size of its site. The word “citation” covers three situations, and ranking rewards the second:
A page links to the pages its information comes from. It helps readers, but for Google, crediting your sources doesn’t replace original effort.
Other pages reuse your information and credit you for it. Google records this attribution, and ranking pushes the original page up.
AI Overviews and AI Mode show the sources of their answer, and a BERT model, separate from the LLM, scores the importance of each cited source.
The 2024 leak described the second case on the index side.
The 2024 leakThe following protobuf is used to store an attribution from one page to (usually) one other page, giving credit for the content. This information is used during ranking to promote the attributed page.ContentAttributions
In Google’s code, each result carries a citation-based originality, and the leak shows that the citations received are the ones that count.
Popfeeds, the system that scores news articles in Google Search, has its Highly Cited signals, named after the label Google has shown since 2022 on stories frequently cited by other newsrooms. Since May 2026, Google shows it on more web article links on the results page and also indicates when an article explicitly references a Highly Cited source (Google’s post).
Google’s guide to ranking systems describes systems that show original content prominently, “including original reporting, ahead of those who merely cite it” (A guide to Google Search ranking systems).
In the code
contentAttributions the credit a page gives to the page its content comes from (leak)OriginalContentScore the originality of pages with little content (leak)CitationBasedOriginality originality measured by citations, attached to each resultHighlyCitedSignals the “Highly Cited” signals of Popfeeds, for news articlesAdvantage 4 of 5: the quality of each section
Q* is the quality score ranking uses. The call notes filed in the antitrust trial describe it as “the notion of trustworthiness”, and it is above all a site-level score.
Antitrust trial, notes of a call with a Google engineerQ* (page quality (i.e., the notion of trustworthiness)) is incredibly important. […] Q is largely static and largely related to the site rather than the query.US antitrust trial exhibit PXR0356, call of February 18, 2025
The 2024 leak names several of Q*’s inputs. NSR, the site’s quality score, goes in as a “bid”, a proposal Google can replace in an emergency. siteAuthority, an authority computed for the site, goes in too, along with clutterScore, a penalty for sites that load many distracting or annoying resources (intrusive ads, pop-ups, widgets). Two models stored with the NSR data, chard and tofu, predict the site’s quality from its content.
The 2024 leakDelta site-level signal in Q* penalizing sites with a large number of distracting/annoying resources loaded by the siteQualityNsrNsrData
In most cases, the scored section is the host, that is the subdomain: www.example.com, blog.example.com and forum.example.com each have their own score. On YouTube and Vimeo, it is the channel, identified by its schema.org markup. A secondary, finer chunking is added for some sites. A section that does not yet have its score gets the average of other host-level sections, the site’s other subdomains.
The 2024 leakIf true indicates that we do not have NSR data computed for the chunk, and instead the data is coming from an average of other host chunks.QualityNsrNsrData
Google states the same rule in its site reputation policy, in August 2026:
Google, August 2026Google generally applies a presumption that individual pages (including new pages) match the overall quality of other pages on the domain.Spam Policies for Google Web Search
A section can also be scored on its own. In November 2024, Google wrote that its systems spot a section that is independent or starkly different from the site’s main content and treat it as a standalone site (Google’s post of November 19, 2024).
When part of a site uses the site’s reputation to publish third-party content, Google may apply a manual action. For users in the European Economic Area, that action has no effect on results; Google may instead separate that section in its systems, and over time it then ranks independently from the rest of the site (Google’s post of August 28, 2026).
Illustrative example · one publisher, five sections, one without a score of its own
www.example.comown scoreblog.example.comown scoreforum.example.comown scoreyoutube.com/@examplethe channel has its scoreshop.example.comno score of its own: the average of the other subdomainsNSR also places the site against comparable sites, above or below the average of its group. It is calibrated on quality rater scores: the leak holds an estimate of NSR’s error against the rating raters give the site, and of how much their ratings vary from page to page.
The call notes filed in the trial describe the same method for most signals: Google starts from content, clicks and “label data from human raters”, then runs a regression.
The same notes describe PageRank as a single signal, “relating to distance from a known good source”, that is an input to the quality score. A link therefore counts twice: its anchor says what the receiving page is about, and the link brings that page closer to the sources Google trusts.
The 2024 leak names this PageRank:
The 2024 leakPagerank-NearestSeeds is a pagerank score for the doc, calculated using NearestSeeds method. This is the production PageRank value teams should use.GDocumentBase
A Google patent filed in 2006 describes the calculation: a set of trusted pages, the seeds, then the shortest distance from these seeds to each page in the link graph, each link getting a length based on its properties and those of the pages it connects. Each page also carries the PageRank of its site’s homepage (homepagePagerankNs).
For a small site. On two points, the established large site has the edge: its new page starts at its domain’s quality level and with its homepage’s PageRank.
The small publisher can act on both. Its score is computed section by section, and NSR compares it with sites in its group: a well-kept small site is measured on what it publishes, and each well-made page raises the level the next one starts from.
PageRank measures a distance to trusted pages: a link from a recognized site brings the page that receives it closer to them, whatever the size of its site.
The large site’s edge also has a limit: when it opens a section to third-party content, Google can rank that section on its own. The small publisher then competes with that section alone, without the reputation of the rest of the domain.
Where Google uses this score. The section’s NSR score follows each result to the SERP. Google also scores the quality of each URL with a system called Autopilot: its output is among the ranking signals computed for the query, and in the leak, the aggregated value of these scores, section by section, sits with the site’s NSR data.
Google acknowledges it in its guide to ranking systems: “Site-wide signals and classifiers are also used and contribute to our understanding of pages” (A guide to Google Search ranking systems).
In the code
siteChunk · nsrSitechunk the scored section: the host, or the channel on YouTube and Vimeo (leak)secondarySiteChunk a secondary, finer chunking (leak)nsrdataFromFallbackPatternKey a section without its own score gets the average of other host-level sections (leak)nsrOverrideBid NSR enters Q* as a “bid”, replaceable in an emergency (leak)siteAuthority the site’s authority, from the NSR family, applied in Q* (leak)PagerankNS · homepagePagerankNs PageRank computed from trusted pages, and that of the site’s homepage (leak)clutterScore the penalty for sites cluttered with annoying resources, in Q* (leak)priorAdjustedNsr NSR compared with the average of its group of sites (leak)siteQualityStddev · nsrVariance the spread of rater scores across pages, NSR’s error against the site’s rating (leak)tofu · chardEncoded two predictors of site quality based on content, stored with NSR (leak)NsrSitechunkSignals the NSR score, attached to each resultnsr_sitechunk the NSR section, in the logs of SERP blocksAutopilotOutput the output of Autopilot, which scores each URL’s quality, among the query’s signalsAdvantage 5 of 5: real authors, visible effort
In March 2024, as it folded its helpful content system into its core ranking systems, Google wrote this about how helpful content is identified:
Google, March 2024There’s no longer one signal or system used to do thisWhat web creators should know about our March 2024 core update and new spam policies
The author has blocks on the SERP: a group of articles by a single author in news, and a bio in the “About this result” panel. Google has shown that bio on English-language results, worldwide, since March 2023 (Five new ways to verify info with Google Search).
On French results, the panel says how long Google has indexed the site, which query terms the page contains, its language and the regions where it is relevant.
The leak showed that Google uses an LLM to estimate the effort put into article pages. After ranking, the expertise twiddler also scores each result.
The 2024 leakLLM-based effort estimation for article pagesQualityNsrPQData
In its October 2026 version, Google’s helpful content guide counts effort and originality, information or perspectives not already available on other sites, among the attributes its quality raters are trained to evaluate:
Google, October 2026Effort: The extent to which human work went into creating the content or the systems powering it. […] Attribution or giving credit to other sources doesn’t replace the need for original effort.Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content
The same guide counts fabricated creator profiles (AI-generated headshots, made-up names, false credentials) as deception, and any deception makes the page untrustworthy to Google’s quality systems: it “is a signal of a low-quality page”.
Google measures helpfulness apart from relevance: when a user gives feedback on a result, it separates “this result is not relevant to my query” from “the result is relevant to my query but not helpful”. A page can be on topic and still disappoint the reader, and that is where the effort put into the article counts.
For a small site. Effort and authorship are rated article by article: a real author, a test done on site, a bio Google shows in “About this result” on English-language results count for each page, whatever the size of the site.
In the code
INFO_LITERACY_AUTHOR_BIO_RESULT the author’s bio, in the “About this result” panel of English-language resultsNEWS_SINGLE_AUTHOR_RESULT_GROUP a group of articles by a single author, in newscontentEffort the effort put into an article page, estimated by an LLM (leak)THIS_RESULT_IS_NOT_RELEVANT_TO_MY_QUERY a user’s feedback: not relevantTHE_RESULT_IS_RELEVANT_TO_MY_QUERY_BUT_NOT_HELPFUL a user’s feedback: relevant, but not helpfulBeyond ranking: the pages that train Gemini. Among the web datasets, four gather the pages kept for their expertise by Ask-LLM, in English and in other languages, across two generations of data (GEMINI_V5_GEMWEB_EXPERTISE_ASKLLM_EN, …_I18N and the same pair for the previous generation).
Ask-LLM is a method published by Google researchers: an LLM directly assesses the quality of each training example (How to Train Data-Efficient LLMs). contentEffort, the effort put into an article, is also estimated by an LLM: an expert page serves ranking as well as Gemini’s training.
Six moves for a small publisher. More advice, twiddler by twiddler, is in our Twiddlers infographic.
One page per precise problem (adjusting a 12-speed derailleur, bleeding a hydraulic brake), linked to the others with anchors that name the problem. The leak showed that Google measures the site’s focus and how far each page strays from its topical center: an off-topic article widens that gap. That focus counts on long-tail queries, where quality takes the query into account.
The advantage: authority on the topicA dated set of readings, a timed test, a downloadable dataset, method included. Every reuse that credits you points back to your page, and Google ranks the original ahead of those who cite it.
The advantage: original informationA signed, dated hands-on account, what worked and what failed, photos taken on site: this is the first-hand content the human voices pipeline picks up and flags. The Forums filter (&udm=18 in a search URL) shows what Google keeps on your topic.
Strip intrusive ads, pop-ups and widgets that get in the way of reading from a template, and fix the whole section at once. The clutter penalty is a site-level signal, and the score is computed section by section.
The advantage: the quality of each sectionIn a folder, a forum or a shop usually goes into the host’s score, unless the section differs sharply from the rest of the site: Google then measures it on its own. On its own subdomain, the section gets its own score, starting from the average of the other subdomains.
So a folder suits a section close to the rest of the site, since Google presumes that a new page matches the other pages on the domain; a subdomain suits a section that has to earn its own score.
The advantage: the quality of each sectionAn author page with their real background. On English-language results, Google presents the author’s background in “About this result”; on French results, the panel shows how long the site has been indexed, the query terms found, the language and the region.
A made-up profile (AI-generated headshot, false credentials) is deception and a signal of a low-quality page. For the site, Google cites, for news, recommendations from professional societies and journalistic awards as evidence of reputation.
The advantage: real authors, visible effortOn a long-tail query, a small publisher outranks a large one when it writes from experience, owns its topic, publishes what others reuse, looks after each section of its site and signs its pages with real authors.
The five advantages of the previous sections all act on a page’s final score. HJ Kim, the Google Search engineer whose call notes were filed in the US antitrust trial, splits it into high-level components: topicality, built on the ABC signals (anchors, body, clicks); NavBoost; quality.
T* (“T star”) is the topicality score. The notes describe it as a “relatively hand-crafted” combination of at least three fundamental signals, the ABC signals: anchors, body and clicks.
In these notes, the C of ABC is a raw signal: historically, how long a user stayed on a page before bouncing back to the SERP. NavBoost, the Google Search system that keeps the memory of clicks, is listed there as a separate component of the score (our NavBoost and Glue infographic).
Antitrust trial, notes of a call with a Google engineerABC signals are the key components of topicality (or a base score), which is Google’s determination of how the document is relevant to the query.US antitrust trial exhibit PXR0356, call of February 18, 2025
Google’s code lists the sources of the terms that sum up a page (salient terms). The trial’s three signals are there, plus the entity’s name, the clicks NavBoost ties to entities, the captions of images and videos, and a synthetic body of text generated by Google.
Google has marked three of these sources deprecated, the title, the date and the URL: they no longer count as sources of their own, and for a web page these terms come from content, anchors and clicks.
The sources of a page’s topic, in the code
BODYthe page’s contentANCHORSthe anchors of links pointing to the pageCLICKSusers’ clicksNAMEthe name of the entity or documentENTITY_NAVBOOST the clicks NavBoost ties to entitiesCAPTIONSthe captions of an image or a videoSYNTHETIC_BODY a synthetic body of text, generated by GoogleTITLE · DATE · URLthe title, the date and the URL, marked deprecated as sources of these termsThe page quality team was born in the days of content farms, sites that paid students 50 cents an article to write thousands on every topic: “That’s why Google started the team to figure out the authoritative source”. Quality remains “hugely important even today”. The leak names several of its inputs, including the score of each site section.
E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust) comes from the quality rater guidelines. For Google, it is a set of criteria its systems spot through several signals, with extra weight for YMYL topics; trust counts most.
Google, Creating helpful contentOf these aspects, trust is most important. […] While E-E-A-T itself isn’t a specific ranking factor, using a mix of factors that can identify content with good E-E-A-T is useful.Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content
| Letter | What serves it in Google’s systems | Section |
|---|---|---|
| Experience | the human voices pipeline, the authenticity twiddler, Orbit’s authentic category, the leak’s small site promotion | The human voices pipeline |
| Expertise | the SERP’s author blocks, LLM-estimated effort, the expertise twiddler | Author and effort |
| Authoritativeness | topic authority (document and query), Google’s three news signals, credit from citations | Long-tail query, small site |
| Trust | Q*, the NSR score of each site section, the cluttered-site penalty, PageRank as distance to a trusted source, NSR calibrated on quality rater scores | One score per site section |
For YMYL topics, Orbit, Google’s page classifier, has three categories that take three of the four YMYL headings of the quality rater guidelines: health or safety (YMYL_HEALTH_OR_SAFETY), financial security (YMYL_FINANCIAL_SECURITY) and government, civics and society (YMYL_SOCIETY). Our search intent infographic shows how Orbit uses these categories.
Sources: US antitrust trial exhibit PXR0356 · 2024 leak documentation (Content Warehouse API) · Google’s guide to ranking systems · Understanding news topic authority · Google’s post of May 10, 2023 · Google’s spam policies · Google’s helpful content guide