Google ranking factors 2026: a complete guide

Google ranking factors are the signals Google’s systems weigh up to decide which pages appear highest in the search results. The ones that matter most in 2026 are click data (through a system Google calls NavBoost), brand authority, information gain, a sound technical foundation and visibility in AI Overviews.

One thing has changed what we know. In May 2024, internal documentation for Google’s Content Warehouse API leaked. Google confirmed the documents were genuine but warned against drawing conclusions from “out-of-context, outdated, or incomplete information”. Read with that caveat, the leak and the testimony from the US antitrust case against Google tell us more about how the algorithm works than Google has ever said publicly. What the industry assumed mattered and what the evidence points to do not always match.

In this article we answer:

• What the most important Google ranking factors are in 2026
• How the API leak changed the picture of what actually counts
• What AI Overviews mean for your SEO strategy
• Which traditional SEO tactics may now work against you
• Concrete steps you can take straight away

We are an SEO agency with 14 years in search. If organic search is meant to bring in more of your sales, this is a good place to start.

The key points

• Google uses click data. The ruling in the US antitrust case (August 2024) describes NavBoost as a signal that memorises user click data, trained on 13 months of it. The 2024 leak shows NavBoost-related modules storing click measures.
• Brand mentions beat backlinks in AI search. Branded web mentions correlate at 0.664 with a brand’s visibility in AI Overviews, against 0.218 for the number of backlinks (Ahrefs, 2025).
• Over-optimisation is associated with traffic losses. Adjective-heavy, clickbait-style titles and many anchor text variations per page correlated with losing traffic in Google’s 2023 updates (Zyppy, 50-site case study, 2024).
• AI Overviews coincide with a 58 per cent lower CTR for the top-ranking page (Ahrefs, December 2025 data). Google, for its part, says links placed inside AI Overviews get a higher click-through rate than links outside them.
• Freshness matters for AI visibility. AI assistants such as ChatGPT and Perplexity cite pages that are on average 25.7 per cent fresher than those in Google’s organic results (Ahrefs, 2025).

These are the factors we have seen make the biggest difference when we improve clients’ rankings.

• Content quality – High quality, up to date, original and genuinely helpful.
• External links – Links from relevant websites.
• Anchor text – Relevant and varied, without over-optimising or drifting off topic.
• Semantic SEO – Match the searcher’s intent.
• User signals (UX) – Make sure the visitor leaves satisfied.
• Technical SEO – The website works as it should. Especially important for large sites and for fixing serious errors.
• Brand signals – Your brand is visible and has a good reputation.
• Visibility in AI Overviews – Getting cited in Google’s AI Overviews is a discipline of its own, and brand mentions elsewhere on the web stand out in the data.

Bear in mind that there is no single recipe. If your site already has strong trust but lacks well-optimised copy, the copy may have the biggest effect. If you are a new company, on the other hand, don’t go straight for the most competitive keywords: you won’t win them yet. Our guide to SEO strategy puts the work in context.

The three strongest signals are click data (how users interact with your page, measured through NavBoost), content relevance (the page answers the search intent better than the competition) and brand authority (your brand is mentioned in the right context on other websites). Google does not publish a ranking of its factors, so this is our assessment. Everything else matters too, but in practice these three move the needle most.

The 80/20 rule for SEO means that 20 per cent of the work produces 80 per cent of the results. In practice that usually means the right keywords on the right pages, a technical foundation that works, and external links from relevant sources. The rest – perfect Core Web Vitals scores, schema.org markup on every page type, exact keyword density – falls into the other category. We often see companies spend a lot of time on technical audits and reach 100/100 in PageSpeed, yet miss the factors that actually move the needle.

• Meta title and meta description – Your meta title and meta description are what people see on Google. They should contain your keywords, match the searcher’s intent and make people want to click.
• Headings – Use H1, H2 and H3 tags to structure your content logically, so it is easy to read for both people and search engines. The headings should revolve around your keywords in a sensible way without confusing the reader or over-optimising.
• Keywords in the copy – Using relevant keywords naturally throughout your content helps search engines understand the page. You don’t always need the exact keyword; what matters is that the page fits the topic semantically.
• Content quality – Create original, valuable and engaging content that meets your visitors’ needs and answers their questions. The aim is that people stop searching on Google once they have visited your page.
• Length – Length in itself is not what counts. But the more you write, the more value a page usually contains. Extra text that adds nothing, and makes the article less relevant, will not improve your ranking just because there are more words.
• Images – Use descriptive file names and alt attributes for your images to help your SEO and make your content more accessible.
• Internal links – A strong internal linking strategy helps spread authority through your website and improves the user experience.
• Visual hierarchy (avgTermWeight) – The 2024 leak includes an attribute called avgTermWeight, described as “the average weighted font size of a term in the doc body”. In other words, Google records how prominently words are displayed on the page. The documentation does not say how this is used in ranking, but it is one more reason to put your key terms in headings and to structure the page with care.

• Freshness – Keep important pages up to date: contact page, about page, blog posts and landing pages. In Ahrefs’ study of around 17 million citations (2025), pages cited by AI assistants such as ChatGPT and Perplexity were on average 25.7 per cent fresher than pages in Google’s organic results, which makes regular content updates more important now than a few years ago. The update has to be real: Google’s own guidance warns against changing the date of a page when the content has not substantially changed.
• Relevance – Content has to answer the searcher’s intent and questions directly to rank well. Read more about semantic SEO.
• E-E-A-T – A broader concept in SEO that stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. Google states that “E-E-A-T itself isn’t a specific ranking factor”; its systems use a mix of other factors to identify content that shows it. The leak showed that Google stores the authors associated with a document as data of their own, which makes authorship more measurable than the E-E-A-T concept suggests. Rand Fishkin, founder of SparkToro, wrote after the leak: “I’m a bit worried that E-E-A-T is 80% propaganda, 20% substance.” That doesn’t mean you should ignore E-E-A-T, but the most concrete thing you can do is link your content clearly to a named, credible author. That can be recorded in a way an abstract “trust score” never can. Read more in our guide to E-E-A-T and SEO.
• Authorship – Are you open about who is behind the content?
• Multimedia – Adding video, images and other media makes your content more engaging and can improve the user experience as well as your SEO.
• Depth – Thorough analysis and in-depth treatment of a topic demonstrate expertise and can give your content an edge in the search results. Depth is not defined by word count.

Information gain is the difference between what you write and what is already on every other page. Google’s guidance on helpful content asks whether a page provides “substantial value when compared to other pages in search results”. Consensus statements that repeat what everyone else says add nothing new, and AI search tools have little reason to cite them either.

So writing “unique and helpful content” is not enough. The question to ask yourself is: what will the reader learn here that they can’t read on the ten other pages ranking for the same keyword?

In practice that means:

• Your own data, tests and observations from your business
• Views that depart from the standard answers, as long as you can back them up
• Specific audiences rather than broad, general guides

Stratabeat’s 2025 study of 300 B2B SaaS websites found that sites segmenting their audience by industry grew organic traffic by 17.3 per cent on average, against 11.5 per cent for those that did not. The practical lesson: write for a specific audience instead of trying to write for everyone.

Off-page SEO is about signals outside your website: how others talk about you, who links to you and how strong your brand appears online. It is an area that has changed noticeably as AI search has taken hold.

• External links – Links from strong, relevant websites are still a clear signal to search engines. But the picture is changing for AI search: branded web mentions have a correlation of 0.664 with a brand’s visibility in AI Overviews, against just 0.218 for the number of backlinks (Ahrefs, 2025). That doesn’t mean you should stop building links, but digital PR and being visible in the right context matter at least as much.
• Anchor text – The anchor text and the context the link sits in. Worth knowing: in Zyppy’s 50-site case study (2024), sites with many anchor text variations per page were more likely to have lost traffic in Google’s 2023 updates, with a correlation of -0.352 for external links. Zyppy stresses that this is a correlation in a small sample, not a confirmed ranking factor.
• Social signals – A presence on social media is said to have a positive effect on SEO. But you shouldn’t be on social media in order to rank. If SEO is the goal, there are easier ways to get there.
• Brand signals – Just over 44 per cent of Google searches are for branded terms, according to SparkToro’s analysis of US search data (December 2024). People searching for you by name is a clear sign that your brand is known. Investing in your brand is therefore not only marketing; it is SEO as well.
• Local listings – For businesses that operate locally, it is important to appear in local directories with consistent NAP details (name, address and phone number). Everything should match, and this applies to every business, even though it matters most for local SEO.

SEO has traditionally been measured in clicks and sessions. But when AI Overviews coincide with a 58 per cent lower click-through rate for the top result, you need a complementary measure of visibility.

Answer share of voice is how often your brand is mentioned or cited when AI tools answer questions in your industry. It measures how much of the conversation you actually own, not how many people clicked a link.

Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, made the case for appearing inside AI Overviews in an interview with The Verge in May 2024:

You won’t find this metric in Google Analytics. But it reflects your actual visibility better than session data in the search landscape that is now taking shape.

Technical SEO is the work done on the website itself that affects its code and structure.

• Mobile friendliness – Your website must be easy to use on every kind of device. Google indexes the mobile version of your site first.
• Load time – A fast website gives visitors a smoother experience and is favoured by search engines. Tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix show you what to improve. Above all, avoid a very slow site; speed matters most on large websites such as online shops.
• Duplicate content – Duplicate content and thin pages can confuse Google and dilute internal link equity.
• SSL/HTTPS – HTTPS is now effectively standard and most websites have it.
• XML sitemap – Creating an XML sitemap and submitting it in Search Console makes it easier for Google to find and index your pages. Referencing it in robots.txt is also recommended.
• URL structure – A well-organised URL structure helps both users and search engines understand the content of your website. Include the keyword in the URL.
• Canonical – Canonical tags are a way to avoid duplicate content. Use a canonical instead of a redirect when both pages still need to exist.
• Structured data – Marking up your content with structured data such as schema.org helps search engines understand it and can improve how your pages appear in the search results. For Google’s AI Overviews, Google says no special structured data is needed; markup that matches the visible text on the page is simply good practice.
• Broken links – If you use WordPress, there are plugins that warn you about broken links.
• 404 pages – Monitor and identify 404 pages as they appear, for example because of a broken link or a broken page.
• Redirects – Handling 301 and 302 redirects correctly is important to preserve link equity and make sure both users and search engines reach the right content.

User signals are part of how Google ranks pages; that is now well documented. In the US antitrust case, Google’s own engineers testified about NavBoost, and the court’s ruling (August 2024) describes it as a signal that memorises user click data, trained on 13 months of it. The 2024 leak shows NavBoost-related modules storing measures such as good clicks, bad clicks and “last longest clicks”, and Google itself says it uses aggregated, anonymised interaction data to assess whether results are relevant. The names suggest that what happens after the click counts: does the visitor stay, or come straight back and choose a competitor?

Our conclusion is the same as before, but now there is evidence behind it: a high click-through rate on Google and the user then ending their search are the most important UX signals to optimise for. That is very close to what NavBoost appears to measure.

You can read more in our article on whether user signals are a ranking factor.

In May 2024, more than 2,500 pages of internal documentation for Google’s Content Warehouse API leaked, describing 14,014 attributes. Google confirmed the documents were genuine but said they were out of context and could be outdated or incomplete. The documentation shows what data Google stores, not how each attribute is weighted. Even so, it is the most detailed look we have had at how the algorithm works, as opposed to what Google chooses to say publicly.

Three findings are particularly relevant to your SEO:

NavBoost – Google’s system for click data. Its role and the 13 months of data come from testimony in the US antitrust case; the leak shows the click measures it stores, including good clicks, bad clicks and “last longest clicks”. The most likely reading is that pages with many “bad clicks”, where visitors quickly leave and carry on searching, lose ground. So it is not only what you write that counts, but what happens after someone clicks.

hostAge – an attribute recording when Google first saw any page on a domain. The documentation says this data is used “to sandbox fresh spam in serving time”. Google has long denied having a sandbox for new websites, and the wording refers specifically to spam. In practice, new websites rarely rank well at first, however good the content. That is one reason SEO takes time, and why we advise against competing for difficult keywords straight away.

avgTermWeight – the average weighted font size of a term on the page. Mike King, founder of iPullRank, was among those who analysed the leak and pointed out that Google tracks the font size of terms in documents, and of link anchor text too. The documentation does not say how much weight this carries.

The leak also showed an attribute called “siteAuthority”, a site-level score, even though Google representatives had said Google has no website authority score. How it is calculated and used is not documented.

Generative engine optimisation (GEO) means optimising to appear in AI-generated answers, such as Google’s AI Overviews, and not only in the traditional search results.

It changes the game in a concrete way. When an AI Overview appears, the top-ranking page has a 58 per cent lower click-through rate on average (Ahrefs, December 2025 data). At the same time, only 37.9 per cent of the URLs cited in AI Overviews also rank in Google’s top 10 for the query (Ahrefs, March 2026). Google explains that AI Overviews may run several related searches across subtopics, which it calls “query fan-out”. A traditional top ranking therefore doesn’t automatically give you visibility in the AI answers.

What is associated with being cited in AI Overviews?

• Brand mentions correlate more strongly than backlinks. Branded web mentions have a correlation of 0.664 with visibility in AI Overviews, compared with 0.218 for the number of backlinks (Ahrefs, 2025).
• Freshness. AI assistants such as ChatGPT and Perplexity cite pages that are on average 25.7 per cent fresher than Google’s organic results. AI Overviews are the exception: in the same study they were among the most likely to cite older pages.
• Clear structure and formatting. Content that is easy to extract, with concrete answers early and a logical heading structure, is easier for AI systems to quote. Google says no special schema.org markup is needed to appear in AI Overviews; normal SEO practice applies.

For more, see our article on how Google’s AI Overviews are changing SEO.

De-optimisation means removing SEO tactics that may now count against you.

It sounds counterintuitive, but in 2024 Zyppy published a case study of 50 websites that had won or lost significant traffic in Google’s 2023 updates, and found clear patterns. The number of adjectives in page titles had a negative correlation of -0.420 with traffic change, and the number of numbers in titles -0.297. Anchor text variety gave -0.352 for external links. Zyppy points out that the sample is small and that these are correlations, not ranking factors. Cyrus Shepard, founder of Zyppy, summed it up like this:

Go through your website with these points in mind:

• [ ] Titles and H1s that are more clickbait than information
• [ ] Inbound links with an unusually wide spread of anchor texts
• [ ] Pages with an updated date but no real content update
• [ ] Thin pages that rank for keywords without giving any real information

De-optimisation is not popular advice in the industry, because it goes against the idea that more SEO is always better. But for companies that have seen sharp drops in organic traffic with no clear explanation, this is often where the problem lies.

If that sounds familiar, book a free search audit and we will show you where your site stands. You can also read more about how we work as an SEO agency.