The Search Quality Rater Guidelines are Google’s public handbook for the people who evaluate search results and web pages on its behalf, the search quality raters. They show what Google considers helpful results.
How are the guidelines used?
Raters judge two things. Page Quality looks at how well a page achieves its purpose, on a scale from Lowest to Highest. Needs Met looks at how well a result satisfies a search query. The September 2025 version also covers YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) topics, where content can affect health, finances or safety.
The guidelines say that no single rating can directly impact how a particular page or site appears in Google Search. Ratings measure how well search systems deliver helpful content and supply examples of helpful and unhelpful results. Google’s blog (October 2021) says that more than 10,000 raters worked worldwide at that time and that Google publishes the guidelines.
For E-E-A-T, the guidelines state that trust is the most important member of the family, because untrustworthy pages have low E-E-A-T however experienced, expert or authoritative they seem.
Example
The guidelines illustrate trust with a financial scam. A scam stays untrustworthy even when its author is highly experienced at running scams.
Sources
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