Google Search API Leak: Top 5 Key Findings for Marketers (2024) .

It’s believed Google mistakenly uploaded this to GitHub, where it was obtained by a non-Googler and shared with Rand. Google has since confirmed this leak to be authentic but notes that the data is incomplete and some is outdated, as it is a small part of the overall system.

The packet was full of API documentation like the below and was uploaded in early March 2024. Rand & Mike believed it to be current - it has mentions of LLMs, but not AI Overviews. The documents have since been removed.

After obtaining the documents, Rand and Mike analysed some of the data and last week shared their early findings, cross-referencing API findings with patents and statements from Google Search Analysts like Matt Cutts, John Mueller, and Gary Illyes.

As Rand and Mike have noted, there is no factor scale included in the leaked documentation. The leak is a list of attributes that Google collects from websites for use in ranking search results - SEOs call these "ranking factors." Google engineers would use this API in combination with other systems to run queries and build new systems or tests, as they are all seemingly linked in what Mike describes as a monolithic repository - a shared environment where all code and systems are connected. However, the presence of attributes does not validate they are current ranking factors. There are notes that black and white statements by Googlers, such as "we do not use user click data," are clearly untrue.

This is an evolving story, and Rand & Mike have posted their initial assessments over the past week. No doubt, more will come from them and others as the documentation is more thoroughly reviewed by SEOs worldwide.

You can go right to the source and read Rand’s post and Mike’s post (and his follow-up on Search Engine Land). These guys are very thorough, and they’re reviewing API documentation, so the content is technical and a bit dense. 

I’ve written this for marketing generalists and managers who know SEO is important and could use some direction and context. 

I’ve picked the top 5 findings from the Google leak, provided high-level context, summarised findings in the leak and highlighted learnings to take forward that validate the SEO tactics you should be focused on to maximise your SEO performance. 

• Click Data from User Searches - the most important signals for ranking
• Site Signals are important for SEO
• Links are important for site's authority and traffic
• What are Twiddlers?
• Being an Expert Entity is important for high-risk industries

If you’d like the TLDR version, you can skip to the end here.

Site Signals are important for SEO

Context

Google has said multiple times that there is no domain authority metric, something that Rand's company Moz became famous for with its Domain Authority (DA) score, which became a way for SEOs and website owners to measure their strength once Google's PageRank toolbar was retired. 

Findings

A Site Authority metric was found in the leaked API documentation. It was also noted that a homepage's authority impacts the whole site's authority. 

Surprisingly, page title structure benefits the whole site, but it is good to know we are on the right path to optimising all title tags. 

Exact keywords in links are important. Link using the exact phrase you want that page to rank for (ensure the anchor text contains your target keyword).

Learnings

It's nice to see the value of the SEO fundamentals validated. Efforts spent uncovering the right keywords, putting them into page titles and headings, and using them prominently in internal linking with keywords help rank those pages, but pleasingly optimising parts can have a macro impact on the site overall, go figure!

Links are important - quality may be determined by the referring site's authority and traffic

Context

We have known links are important for a long time. Google has stated that links to your website and the helpfulness of your content are the key ingredients for improved rankings, visibility and organic traffic.

Findings

Interestingly, the documentation notes a relationship between link quality and traffic to the site. Here's the clause verbatim from the leaked documentation:

"Google has three buckets/tiers for classifying their link indexes (low, medium, high quality). Click data is used to determine which link graph index tier a document belongs to."

There are also measures to identify if you are building links too quickly, and penalties are handed out algorithmically. So that's a no to link-building services.

Learnings

Link building blew up many years ago when the PageRank toolbar and MOZ’s Domain Authority handed the SEO community a scoring system for site quality and spurred the industry towards buying links as a practice, which Google spent years cleaning up with periodic link penalty algorithms called Penguin.

Google says don't buy links; make content that makes people want to link to you. Building links does work, but building links on sites no one will click or visit will, at best, be ignored and, at worst, get you penalised.

So you should aim to create content that will get picked up by relevant websites who will link to you. There have been practices of content collaborations - beauty brands work with fashion publishers, news sites publish banking research & whitepapers, deal sites post about eCommerce deals as long as you're not Forbes Coupons (site authority abuse*). 

Websites get links and mentions for many reasons, but if those links get a decent amount of clicks coming from them (referral traffic), they will count more.

This is a good time to talk about Twiddlers.

Being an Expert Entity is Important for High-Risk Industries

Context

You may have heard about the principles of Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trust (E-E-A-T) and Your Money Your Life (YMYL) put forward by Google. 

E-E-A-T has been noted as particularly important for queries that could put a person's well-being (health, finance, safety) at risk if they obtained the wrong information from an untrustworthy source. 

Google does a lot of work with its quality raters and systems to identify if a query is a YMYL and the more strongly a topic is YMYL (think mental health), the greater the E-E-A-T requirements for websites that want to rank for that query. 

You can read the Google E-E-A-T guidelines here. 

Findings

Authorship is noted as a value, so it'scontent authors are likely recognised and included in Google's entity graph.  

The documentation has a number of metrics for YMYL, likely measuring a query's YMYL on a scale of high to low. There's also a system to predict whether a never-before-seen query should be classified as YMYL. 

It was also noted that Google are vectorising content to identify how different one piece of content is from the overall website’s topical affinity - i.e. Are you talking outside your lane and expecting to rank for another topic? Does this need to be addressed (site authority abuse)? There is a mention of Gold Standard documents, so research and white-papers are worthwhile. 

There is also a score for content effort, where a LLM (Large Language Model like Gemini/ChatGPT/Perplexity) estimates the effort for article pages, likely to measure GenAI usage for content creation.  

Learnings

We know Google has invested significantly in building its entity graph since the advent of semantic search. For this reason, it’s in your best interest to identify the people within your business who are the experts and have them be your brand ambassador on the website to strengthen your expertise and authority in Google's eyes. 

If you don’t have one - you should find one and align them to your brand, having them author content on your website and share it with their audience over time to tie strings between them and your brand (think Kochie and Allianz).

Take on the user experience feedback noted earlier, bring out your ambassador’s Expertise, you’ll get mentions and links (signals of Authority?), add some Trust signals with customer reviews, and you’ll be on your way to being an E-E-A-T evangelist.

What if your industry isn't covered by YMYL, like B2C retail? Should you still do E-E-A-T? Just because you're not covered now doesn't mean Google has no plans to expand. That said, a good user experience, highlighting the expert figures within your business, and showing customer reviews to demonstrate trust will, in the end, make your brand more successful, so they're worth doing.