On September 11, 2025, Google updated its search quality raters guidelines PDF. The last update was over seven months ago, on January 23, 2025.
This new version mainly adds small clarifications, including:
- More guidance on how to rate YMYL (Your Money, Your Life) content.
- New examples for rating newer features like AI Overviews, similar to past examples for featured snippets and knowledge panels.
- Minor typo fixes and other small edits.
The document grew slightly, from 181 pages to 182 pages, making this a small but notable update.
What’s New in the Update
Google’s change log highlights these key updates:
- Updated YMYL definitions: Clearer explanations of what qualifies as “Your Money, Your Life” content.
- More examples for clarity: Added fresh examples to help raters better understand how to evaluate pages, including AI-related results.
- Minor edits: Small fixes such as typo corrections and slight wording changes.
The new section also includes examples of AI Overviews, showing how raters should assess AI-generated summaries—similar to past guidance for featured snippets and knowledge panels.
Another section updated was the YMYL definitions, which were clarified by Google.
“”YMYL Government, Civics & Society: Topics that could negatively impact groups of people, issues of public interest, trust in public institutions, election and voting information, and any other informational topics about government, civics or society that impacts people’s live.””
It used to say:
“”YMYL Society: Topics that could negatively impact groups of people, issues of public interest, trust in public institutions, etc””
These are the main changes I found in the document. I shared a few AI Overview examples above as a preview but not all of them.
Earlier Versions of the Search Quality Rater Guidelines
Here are the previous editions of the guidelines if you’d like to download and compare them:
- September 11, 2025 PDF download link
- Janaury 23, 2025 PDF download link
- March 5, 2024 PDF download link
- November 16, 2023 PDF download link
- December 15, 2022 PDF download link
- July 28, 2022 PDF download link
- October 19, 2021 PDF download link
- October 14, 2020 PDF download link
- December 5, 2019 PDF download link
- May 16, 2019 PDF download link
- June 20, 2018 PDF download link
- July 27, 2017 PDF download link
What Quality Raters & Guidelines Mean
Google says these guidelines are used by outside reviewers to check how well Google Search is working. Their feedback does not directly change rankings. The guidelines simply explain what kind of content is most useful for people. Google also shares tips on making helpful, user-focused content so creators can improve their own pages.
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