Marketing Leaders’ Guide to Google’s Ranking Factors

Google uses hundreds of ranking signals, but only a few really matter.

We asked Andrew Tuxford, Head of SEO at Exposure Ninja, to share the five Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) ranking factors that have the biggest impact on getting your website to the top of Google.

We also explore how these core SEO elements relate to AI Search Optimisation, helping your brand appear in both traditional search results and AI-generated answers.

What Are Google’s Ranking Factors?

Google ranking factors are the signals it uses to rank web pages in its search results. There are over 200 known factors, but most of them serve one of two purposes:

“Either they’re communicating to Google what specifically you do, or they’re focused on the quality of what you do,” says Andrew Tuxford.

In other words, Google is trying to figure out two things:

1. Relevance: What is this page about?
2. Quality: Is it the best option for the user right now?

This captures Google’s core mission: to serve the most helpful content that answers people’s questions as accurately and efficiently as possible.

“Google’s focus has always been to serve the best content to its users that answers their needs at the time,” says Andrew. “If Google is very certain that you do a certain thing and it believes that you do it well, you will rank highly.”

So while the algorithm may be complex, the objective is simple: relevance + quality = rankings.

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Why Google Stays Vague About Ranking Factors

Google doesn’t publish a complete list of its SEO ranking factors, and for good reason.

“They can’t give away the secret sauce,” Andrew Tuxford observes. “They can’t just turn around and say, ‘These are all our ranking factors’ because then Bing or Yahoo could just copy them and their algorithm would be just as good. Why would you continue to use Google when you can use a competitor?”

This vagueness protects Google’s competitive advantage whilst preventing widespread manipulation of search results, or black hat SEO.

The Google API Leak: What We Learned

The 2024 Google Search API leak caused a stir in the SEO community, but what did it actually reveal?

“I don’t think it told us much that good SEOs didn’t already know,” Andrew Tuxford notes. “It confirmed things that good SEOs knew but had never been officially confirmed or even went counter to what Google had officially stated.”

Several factors that Google had specifically denied were confirmed to be genuine ranking signals. Good SEOs had already observed these patterns in their campaigns, but the leak provided definitive proof.

One surprising discovery was that Google maintains up to 20 versions of your web pages. “Google records older versions of your website,” Andrew Tuxford explains. “If you edit and change a page, Google will see that page and update its ranking accordingly, but it also remembers older versions of the page up to 20 versions, and those factor into the ranking of the current version.”

This explains why website recovery after penalties can be frustratingly slow. You’re not just dealing with your current content but also the weighted influence of historical versions.

Top 5 Most Important SEO Ranking Factors 

Despite Google’s ongoing reluctance to confirm its full algorithm, we know certain ranking factors carry more weight than others. Years of testing, case studies, and the API leak have made it clear which areas matter most when it comes to climbing the rankings.

Here are the top five ranking factors to focus on in your SEO strategy:

Content Relevance

Content relevance is one of the most critical factors in search rankings today. According to Semrush’s 2024 Ranking Factors Study, text relevance had the strongest correlation with high-ranking content, appearing on average in 90.6% of top 10 results.

Relevance refers to how closely your content matches what the user is searching for. Google determines this by understanding search intent, or the goal behind the query. It uses language models that interpret meaning, recognise synonyms, correct spelling errors, and identify context clues like location, content type, or current events.

Once intent is established, Google examines your page to determine whether it contains relevant information for the searcher’s query.

Google explains: “The most basic signal that information is relevant is when content contains the same keywords as your search query. For example, if those keywords appear in the headings or body text of a web page, the information might be more relevant.”

Here are a few ways to improve content relevance:

• Align with Search Intent: Study the top-ranking pages for your target keyword. Identify what the user is expecting and structure your content to meet that need.
• Use Clear, Keyword-aligned Headings: Ensure your H1 and subheadings reflect the terms and structure people use when searching.
• Include Keywords Naturally in Body Text: Include your primary and secondary keywords naturally within the content, using variations and synonyms to support relevance while avoiding keyword stuffing.
• Add Supporting Content: Include related topics, FAQs, examples, or visuals that reinforce the page’s focus.

While Google still dominates the search engine market share, AI platforms rapidly change how people discover, evaluate, and act on information. Users are no longer limited to ten blue links; they’re asking full questions and receiving direct, conversational answers from tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s Gemini.

AI Search introduces a new layer to content relevance. These platforms are not just looking for exact keyword matches. They’re identifying pages that provide comprehensive, useful, and clearly structured answers to real questions.

This means your blog content strategy needs to change to be successful in AI Search. For AI Search Optimisation, shift your focus from exact keyword matching to semantic relevance.

Use natural language that reflects how your audience actually asks questions. Incorporate synonyms, related phrases, and variations to help AI tools understand the full context of your content and surface it in relevant responses.

Content Quality

Once Google determines that your content is relevant to a user’s query, quality becomes the key factor in determining how highly that content ranks.

This aligns with Semrush’s Ranking Factors Study, which found that content quality had the second strongest correlation with high rankings, appearing in 76.9% of top 10 results on average.

Quality refers to how well your content serves the user’s intent, including how accurate, useful, and trustworthy it is.

Google assesses content quality through the principles of Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T). While E-E-A-T is not a direct ranking signal, it guides how Google’s human quality raters and its algorithms assess content.

Andrew Tuxford explains: “E-E-A-T isn’t specifically part of Google’s algorithm, but the algorithm is designed to mirror how a human evaluator would judge content quality. It looks at various signals to estimate how much experience, authority, and trust a page demonstrates.”

Here are a few ways to assess the quality of your content:

• Depth of Information: Does your content fully answer the user’s query, including follow-up questions or related subtopics?
• Original Insights: Are you offering something users can’t find elsewhere? First-hand experience, unique viewpoints, and data-backed conclusions add real value.
• Clarity and Readability: Is the content easy to understand, scan, and digest? Use simple language, short paragraphs, clear headings, and visual elements where helpful.
• Demonstration of Expertise: Does the content reflect a deep understanding of the topic? Include examples, case studies, expert quotes, or author credentials to reinforce authority.
• Accuracy and Reliability: Are your facts current and well-sourced? Reference credible data and cite trustworthy sources to strengthen trustworthiness.

High-quality content no longer impacts just organic rankings. It also improves your brand visibility across AI platforms.

AI tools are designed to surface clear, reliable, and well-structured content. They pull from trustworthy sources to build summaries and answer questions. If your content is well-written, well-organised, and credible, it is far more likely to be cited or featured by these AI platforms.

By prioritising human-friendly and AI-optimised content formatting, you not only rank better in search but also increase your chances of appearing in AI-generated answers across platforms.

Page Experience

Google notes: “When all other signals are relatively equal, content that people will find more accessible may perform better.”

This highlights why page experience plays a role in search performance. It doesn’t replace content relevance or quality, but it can tip the scales in competitive search results.

Page experience refers to how users interact with your site, and whether that experience is smooth, fast, and frustration-free. While the quality of content answers the user’s question, page experience determines whether they stick around to read it.

These are a few of the elements that define a strong page experience:

• Core Web Vitals
• Mobile usability
• HTTPS security
• Minimal ad experience and intrusiveness
• Accessibility best practices, such as clear navigation and heading structure.

Andrew Tuxford emphasises: “Page experience is critical. It may not be the top factor, but if your content quality is decent and your technical SEO is solid, bad page experience can still hold you back. You can’t afford to frustrate users with slow load times or clunky design, as Google notices that.”

While page experience has traditionally been seen as a user-facing factor in SEO, it now plays a direct role in AI Search visibility, especially as agentic AI begins making buying decisions on behalf of users.

These AI agents behave more like high-speed, high-efficiency shoppers than human users. Unless you optimise your website for AI Search, AI agents will abandon it and choose a competitor that’s faster, clearer, and easier to interpret.

This is precisely what happened when Charlie Marchant, CEO of Exposure Ninja, used ChatGPT’s Agent to buy a bag of coffee. During the search, one site had a 404 error. Rather than trying to navigate around the site, the AI agent moved onto a competitor.

That makes page experience a human UX priority and a machine UX priority if you want to protect your rankings and website revenue.

Technical SEO

“It doesn’t matter how relevant or high-quality your content, or how great your page experience is, if Google can’t crawl it and understand it properly,” says Andrew Tuxford.

Where page experience is user-facing, technical SEO is search engine-facing. It’s the foundation that allows your content to be discovered, crawled, and understood by search engines, which directly influence indexing and ranking outcomes.

This foundational element includes:

• Site Architecture: Logical, crawlable structure.
• XML Sitemaps: Clear roadmaps for search engines.
• Schema Markup: Structured data that helps Google understand content context.
• Internal Linking: Strategic connections between related pages.

“Schema markup and site structure are underrated ranking factors,” says Andrew. “They often get overlooked because they’re often unfamiliar and complex to non-SEOs, but they can make a big difference to how your pages perform in the results pages.”

To build a solid technical foundation, start with a technical SEO audit. This acts like a health check for your site, identifying hidden issues that could be blocking crawlers, slowing down page speed, or confusing search engines. Prioritising simple SEO fixes can help improve visibility and rankings.

Building a strong technical foundation doesn’t just benefit your Google rankings. It directly impacts how your content performs in AI Search.

Just like traditional search engines, AI tools rely on clean, accessible code, clear content hierarchy, and structured data to understand context and determine relevance. Technical SEO ensures your content is understandable, increasing the likelihood of being cited or featured in AI-generated responses.

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Backlinks

Backlinks remain a ranking signal in Google’s algorithm. They act as “votes of confidence,” showing that other sources find your content valuable, trustworthy, and worth referencing. The more authoritative and relevant the linking site, the more weight the backlink carries.

But backlinks aren’t the make-or-break signal many believe them to be.

“That’s not to say backlinks aren’t important,” explains Andrew Tuxford, “but it is possible to rank at the top of Google without a strong backlink profile. It’s harder, but achievable, unlike poor technical SEO or low content quality, which will hold you back no matter what.”

What matters most is quality backlinks, not quantity. A few high-authority, contextually relevant backlinks are far more valuable than dozens of low-quality or spammy links. Google’s systems are designed to reward content that earns links naturally from reputable sources, rather than through manipulation or scale.

For AI Search, backlinks still matter, but brand mentions are even more important.

Platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity assess not only where a brand is linked but also how frequently it’s mentioned across trusted sources. These mentions help AI systems recognise your brand, connect it with relevant topics, and evaluate your authority.

Ahrefs’ latest research shows that web-wide brand mentions now correlate more strongly with AI visibility than backlinks, especially in trust-driven verticals like finance, healthcare, and legal.

“In AI Search, mentions tell the model who you are, what you do, and how credible you are,” says Tim Cameron-Kitchen, Founder of Exposure Ninja. “The more consistently your brand is mentioned across the web, the more likely AI is to cite or recommend you.”

The most powerful strategy is to earn brand mentions with contextual backlinks on trusted third-party sites. These dual signals help Google and AI systems recognise your brand’s authority, credibility, and relevance to specific topics.

Here’s how to do it:

• Use digital PR to earn editorial features that include brand mentions and backlinks.
• Contribute expert quotes or thought leadership to media outlets for link building.
• Build content worth referencing, including original research, data visualisations, and expert guides.
• Get cited in roundups and product recommendations, where your brand becomes the top choice in your category, like we did for our client ZUGU.

There’s no strict hierarchy when it comes to Google’s ranking factors. They all contribute, but their impact depends on your site’s specific strengths and weaknesses. You could have great content, but if your technical SEO is poor or your site loads slowly, you’ll struggle to rank. Likewise, backlinks are helpful, but they won’t save you if Google can’t crawl or understand your content. It’s not about ticking off a checklist in a certain order. It’s about making sure everything works together to show Google that you’re the best answer for the user.

Andrew Tuxford
Head of SEO

How AI is Reshaping Google Ranking Factors

AI and machine learning are central to how Google evaluates and ranks content. AI technologies like RankBrain, BERT, MUM, and Neural Matching help Google interpret search queries with greater nuance, understand context at scale, and surface content that genuinely meets user needs.

“I think AI is helping Google actually get closer to what it’s always wanted to be,” says Andrew Tuxford. “Google’s focus has always been to serve the best content to its users that answers their needs at the time.”

AI is shifting how content is ranked. Rather than relying heavily on simplistic signals like keyword density or exact matches, AI allows Google to:

• Accurately match content to user intent.
• Recognise relevance beyond exact keywords.
• Evaluate quality based on clarity, depth, and usefulness.
• Prioritise genuinely helpful content over heavily optimised pages.

This evolution means ranking is less about “gaming the algorithm” and more about meeting user needs with clear, high-quality, authoritative content.

Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode Ranking Factors

No discussion of Google’s ranking factors is complete without covering AI Overviews and AI Mode.

• AI Overviews, formerly known as Search Generative Experience (SGE), appear above traditional search results and generate short, AI-written answers supported by linked citations.
• AI Mode, introduced in May 2025, replaces traditional results with a fully AI-generated response built from multiple background searches using Google’s Gemini model.

Ranking on these AI-driven platforms isn’t about climbing to position one on a SERP. It’s about increasing your AI Share of Voice (SoV), or how often your brand, product or service, or content is directly cited, mentioned, or recommended by the AI in its answers.

To improve your visibility in AI Mode and performance in AI Overviews, focus on the following:

• Define and reinforce your brand positioning by consistently using your core concepts across all channels and platforms.
• Strengthen your traditional SEO performance to ensure your content is discoverable, indexable, and meets Google’s baseline ranking criteria.
• Perform an AI Search audit, assessing core metrics like AI visibility and brand sentiment.
• Optimise content for clarity and structure so it’s easy for AI to extract and quote.
• Demonstrate first-hand expertise through real examples, case studies, and author bios.
• Cover related subtopics to match query fan-out, helping AI build a full-picture answer using your content.
• Earn authoritative third-party mentions through Digital PR, reviews, and media coverage.
• Implement schema markup and clean HTML structure to support machine readability.

Google’s AI search experience is designed to reward clarity, credibility, and authority, not just keywords and links. Your content must be understandable, extractable, and trustworthy across the web to succeed.

Rank at the Top of Google and AI Search

To win in Google, you need to nail these core SEO ranking factors:

• Content Relevance: Using natural language and clear keyword signals, align your pages with search intent.
• Content Quality: Prioritise clarity, originality, accuracy, and depth. Support with expert insight or first-hand experience.
• Page Experience: Deliver a fast, mobile-friendly, accessible browsing experience with minimal friction.
• Technical SEO: Use clean code, schema markup, internal linking, and crawlable structure to support discovery and understanding.
• Backlinks: Earn inbound links from authoritative, contextually relevant sources to strengthen trust and authority.

But don’t forget about AI Search. To stay visible in tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Mode, you also need to:

• Be cited and recommended by AI tools, not just ranked by Google.
• Optimise for semantic relevance using natural, conversational language and topic depth.
• Structure content clearly so it’s easy for AI to extract and summarise.
• Earn brand mentions across trusted sites, forums, and reviews.
• Build machine-friendly websites that AI agents can navigate, interpret, and convert through.

Ready to dominate traditional and AI Search? Request a marketing review to see how your current strategy stacks up against Google’s ranking factors and AI visibility signals and get a clear, tailored plan to improve your performance.

Looking to learn more about optimising for AI Search? Read:

• How to Create an AI Search Optimisation Strategy

FAQs

How many Google ranking factors are there?

“There are over 200 ranking factors. Google won’t tell us, but it’s over 200,” confirms Andrew Tuxford. Even with the Google API leak, the complete list remains a mystery.

What are the denied Google ranking factors?

Google previously denied several ranking factors which were later confirmed through the API leak. The most significant was that Google claimed it didn’t use any kind of site or domain authority score, but the leak proved otherwise. Google also denied that website size plays a ranking factor, though larger sites often perform better due to increased content volume and internal linking opportunities.

Is Google’s E-E-A-T a ranking factor?

“E-E-A-T isn’t specifically part of Google’s algorithm, but the algorithm is designed to mirror how a human evaluator would judge content quality. It looks at various signals to estimate how much experience, authority, and trust a page demonstrates,” says Andrew Tuxford.

Is keyword density a ranking factor?

“Keyword density isn’t a direct ranking factor and hasn’t been for years. However, using the right keywords in the right places helps Google understand what your content is about and what purpose it serves. So it’s not about how many times a word appears, but how clearly the content aligns with intent,” says Andrew Tuxford.

Are exact-match domains a ranking factor?

“Yes and no. Exact-match domains can help you rank for that specific keyword, because Google doesn’t always know if someone’s searching for a service or a brand. But it won’t help you rank for related or broader keywords. It’s a small advantage for one query, not a boost across the board,” explains Andrew Tuxford.