Someone mentioned the other day that Google’s Quality Raters Guidelines has been refreshed and when I took a look, it was on the 23rd January 2025. How did I miss that?
TL;DR
- Google’s Quality Raters Guidelines were updated on 23rd Jan 2025
- They now have a few mentions of generative AI whereas they didn’t previously
- Quality raters are being asked to assess whether generative AI has been used to add value to webpages or not
- If generative AI has added little-to-no value for readers, these pages should be marked as the lowest
- Scaled content abuse was introduced as a web spam issue in March 2024
- It is now being manually evaluated in these new quality guidelines
- The page count is now increased by about 17 additional pages
- Speak with a highly experienced SEO expert to ensure your website is good enough
What are Google’s Quality Raters Guidelines?
The Quality Raters Guidelines (QRG) are a specification for human quality assurance evaluators to use when assessing the quality of a webpage and website.
Quality raters help to manually evaluate and improve the quality of Google’s search results.They evaluate algorithm changes, and provide feedback that Google uses to assess aspects that algorithms might not be able to quantify.
The QRG is a large and complex document. The last time I read it a few years ago it was 168 pages long. There were updates last year but they were the new spam guidelines IIRC (Expired domain -, reputation -, and scaled content abuse). I don’t recall the page count increasing. The January 2025 version now counts 181 pages.
Basically, a quality rater needs to read the guidelines in order to accurately evaluate web pages. They follow a detailed process to:
- Understand search intent
- Evaluate the relevance
- Assess against EEAT
- Rate the page quality
- Identify and rate search results
- Provide feedback and
- Rinse and repeat.
This is an iterative process and quality raters do not directly influence the ranking of webpages, they only provide the feedback that Google then considers for future algorithm changes.
Why are the QRGs Important to Website Owners?
Building websites and running them is a critical part of business these days. The number of times I’ve seen beautiful websites designed and built that have no consideration for the greater use, is quite amazing. They look great but they usually don’t function well.
By understanding what comprises a quality result, website owners can improve their offerings to ensure that they’re providing what their visitors want. Ranking highly because someone has gamed an algorithm is one thing, but for a users to be happy with the resulting webpage is the ultimate goal.
The best SEO experts know the Quality Raters Guidelines and can advise and act to improve web pages. So be wary of allowing anyone else, even website designers, account managers or copywriters to dictate how things should be built.
These New QRGs – Generative AI You Say?
Yes – Generative AI has not been mentioned in previous versions of the guidelines, so this is an important addition from Google.
Ever since ChatGPT was publicly announced in November 2022, generative AI has been used extensively to create content. It’s particularly tempting for website owners to use gen AI to create new content in order to save on costs, save on time, and create content that they may not have the skills or resources to provide otherwise. It’s tempting, I know, I’ve done it myself at times.
However, not long after the release of ChatGPT there were two big things that happened:
- Google internally issued a “code red”because this new generative AI tool was powerful and immensely popular. The details of this internal alert we don’t know and can only speculate – was this other tool a threat to business and Google’s market dominance?
- As a new technology a number of people took the opportunity to position themselves as the gurus of the new tools,and I personally was absolutely horrified, as a writer and SEO, to see web content encouraging other users to leverage generative AI to produce vast quantities of content.
By May 2023, just six months after ChatGPT-3.5’s release, at Google’s I/O developer conference, Search Generative Experience was announced and Google Bard was the browser-based rival to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
In the last two years or so we’ve also had Bard renamed Gemini, ChatGPT reach version 4 and 4o, with Claude, also Perplexity, and now DeepSeek AI tools being released. There are many more but these are the most notable players.
Scaled Content Abuse
In Google’s March 2024 core update there was a spam update element which included scaled content abuse. In basic terms, this is a practice where large volumes of webpage content are produced with the primary intent of manipulating the search rankings. This type of content is very often low-quality, unoriginal, and provides little or no value to the reader.
Now, when you match this identification of such a practice with the YouTube videos in early 2023 boasting “Create 300 blog posts in 15 minutes using generative AI” then you can see the scale of the problem. That, and connecting it all with the fact that Google no longer announces how many spam pages they detect every single day (They stopped telling us at 40 billion in 2020), there’s a major problem on the world wide web.
The announcement of spam updates to combat scaled content abuse was brilliant for full time web professionals, and the promoters of such schemes were suddenly dropped from the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
So Back to the Guidelines: Generative AI Mentioned How Much?
I’ve had a look and it appears that the term “generative AI” appears just over a dozen times in the new January 2025 version of the Quality Raters Guidelines.
The important point the new document makes is that, like many such technologies, they are helpful tools but can also be misused.
The QRGs point out that content created by generative AI and providing little-to-no value for website visitors (When compared to other web content on the same topic) should be rated Lowest. They stipulate that generative AI content is not poor quality per se, but that evaluators should be aware of and make the distinction between low quality and high quality AI content.
One of the funniest points, in my opinion, is the guidance on looking for giveaways that low quality content is AI generated, by looking for snippets of text such as “As an AI language model…” where low effort users have simply cut and pasted full gen AI output with no quality assurance of their own.
The Moral of the QRG Story Is…
Read the guidelines. Understand what quality content is. And by all means use generative AI to help you write content but please don’t rely on it 100%
I know a chap who fully generated all his content until he realised that it wasn’t performing well in search and so now he has an assistant to help him “humanise” his content.
So write it all by hand (Like this blog post) and use AI to help you research, proofread, revise, and even create the content, but please make sure that it’s good quality and adds value to the reader.
Conclusion
If you have a business website and you’re struggling to get visibility and clicks, then maybe you need a website audit. I can evaluate the quality of your website, content, and SEO then provide a unique tailor-made digital marketing, website, and content strategy to fix what you have and make your website more helpful for your audience.
Call me on 01252 692 765
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