Search Quality Rater Guidelines
Also called: QRG, quality rater guidelines, search quality evaluator guidelines, SQRG
The Search Quality Rater Guidelines are Google's public handbook that tells its human quality raters how to judge a page's quality and how well a result meets a searcher's need. Rater scores do not rank your site directly; Google uses them to test and train its ranking systems.
Google publishes these guidelines (the current edition is dated September 11, 2025 and runs 182 pages) so anyone can read the same criteria its raters apply. Two ratings dominate: Page Quality, how good a page is at its purpose, and Needs Met, how well a result satisfies the query.
What raters actually score
Page Quality runs on a five-step scale: Lowest, Low, Medium, High, Highest. Raters weigh the purpose of the page, the quality and effort of the Main Content, the reputation of the site and its creators, and E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust). Google calls Trust “the most important member of the E-E-A-T family,” because “untrustworthy pages have low E-E-A-T no matter how Experienced, Expert, or Authoritative they may seem.” A financial scam run by an expert scammer still scores Lowest.
Standards rise sharply for YMYL topics, meaning Your Money or Your Life: content that could affect someone’s health, financial stability, safety, or the well-being of society. A page on tsunami evacuation routes is held to a far higher bar than one on how often to wash jeans.
The point worth repeating: raters never touch your live rankings. Google’s own explanation is that rater data is not used directly in its ranking systems; the scores work the way a restaurant reads comment cards from diners, a signal about whether things are working, not a lever wired to any one table. The guidelines are a map of what “good” looks like, not a scoring engine wired to your URL.
How it affects your traffic
You cannot optimize for the raters themselves, but you can build the exact signals they are trained to reward, and most of those signals are on-page work. Clear page purpose, high-effort main content, visible author and About/contact information, and honest handling of YMYL claims are the concrete things that separate a High page from a Low one. Reading the guidelines as a checklist and fixing pages against it is what our On-Page SEO work does, so the pages Google's systems learn to trust are the ones that end up sending you traffic.
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