The Humans Behind Google’s Algorithm and What That Means for your Website

When Google’s John Mueller speaks, (smart) SEOs listen. At the recent Search Central Live NYC event, he shared some invaluable insights about how Google actually evaluates websites. Turns out, it’s a lot more human than most people realise (I mean, I’ve been telling you that for ages, right?).

Let’s take a look at what this means for your website and what you should be focusing on.

The Humans Behind Google’s Algorithm

Google employs an army of people called “quality raters” to evaluate search results. These aren’t just random folks clicking buttons – they’re using a 180-page guidebook to judge whether Google’s search results are actually good or complete rubbish.

What Quality Raters Actually Do

These third-party reviewers don’t directly control your rankings (phew!). Instead, they’re like Google’s taste-testers, sampling the search results and giving feedback on whether algorithm changes are going in the right direction.

John explained it like this: quality raters “review the quality of search results” and “review the quality of web pages to let us know, are we in a good place?”

In other words, while Google’s algorithm might seem like a mysterious black box, there are actual humans checking if it’s working properly.

The Guidelines That Matter

The Quality Raters Guidelines is a massive document that John specifically called “surprisingly important” for website owners. It’s not a ranking manual (more on that in a mo), but it does reveal what Google considers valuable.

Think of it as getting a peek at the exam criteria before taking the test. You still have to do the work, but at least you know what the teacher is looking for.

What This Means For Your SEO

This insight from John reinforces something that too many SEOs forget a lot of the time: Google’s algorithms are trying to think like humans.

Stop Obsessing Over Technical Checklists

Many SEOs and website owners are still treating Google like it’s 2010 – frantically counting keyword density, obsessing over whether every image has keyword packed alt text, and panicking about H1 headers.

But John’s comments reveal that Google’s far more concerned with whether actual humans find your content useful. The machines are just trying to predict what people will like.

The End of Robotic SEO

The days of “feed the algorithm exactly what it wants” are fading fast. Google’s using quality raters to train its systems to recognise genuinely helpful content – which means your SEO strategy needs to focus on being genuinely helpful too.

This doesn’t mean technical SEO is dead – your site still needs to function properly. But it does mean that no amount of technical wizardry will save mediocre content.

The Biggest Misconception John Cleared Up

There’s a persistent myth that the Quality Raters Guidelines are basically Google’s secret ranking manual. John explicitly said this isn’t true.

The guidelines don’t tell you “this is how we do ranking,” he explained. They’re about how Google evaluates whether its search results are good, not a step-by-step guide to ranking better.

What The Guidelines Actually Tell Us

The quality raters perform different types of evaluations:

1. Page quality assessments – is this a high-quality page or not?
2. Needs met evaluations – do these search results satisfy what the user was looking for?
3. Side-by-side comparisons – which set of results is better?

These tasks all focus on human judgment – not mechanical factors like keyword count or backlink profiles.

How To Use This Information Today

So what should you do with this insight from John? Here’s how to apply it to your website:

Read The Guidelines (Or At Least Skim Them)

John specifically recommended that website owners should at least search through the Quality Raters Guidelines for topics relevant to their business. It’s publicly available, and while you don’t need to memorise all 180 pages, knowing the basic principles will help you understand what Google values.

Focus On Human Experience

Every SEO decision should pass a simple test: does this make the site better for actual human visitors? If you’re adding author bios, structured data, or tweaking meta descriptions solely for SEO with no user benefit, you’re missing the point.

Stop Chasing Algorithm Updates

Google makes thousands of changes to its search algorithm yearly, and chasing each one is exhausting and often pointless. Instead, focus on what doesn’t change – Google’s desire to show searchers the most helpful, relevant content possible.

What It All Means

The key takeaway from John’s discussion is that while Google’s algorithms might be machines, they’re machines designed to think like humans. Quality raters are the human element that helps Google understand what genuinely good content looks like.

This means your SEO strategy needs to evolve beyond mechanical optimisation and focus on creating content that actual people find valuable, trustworthy, and useful.

In other words, stop trying to trick the algorithm and start trying to help your visitors. Because increasingly, those are becoming the same thing.

For more info, see this Search Engine Journal recap of John’s talk.