Danny Sullivan, Google's Search Liaison, said it again, that Google does not have a system to recognize if a site is run by a big brand and then automatically just ranks it higher. He said on X, "but no, we don't have a brand-ranking system."
I mean, not that most of you believe it, but Google has said this countless times over the years, including a few months ago.
Danny explained on X, after he felt he may have been misquoted at the Search Central Live NYC event:
I given I talked at length at the event (and other things in the past) about how we're not somehow trying to detect a "brand" and then rank based on it being a big brand, small brand, whatever brand, it feels like a paraphrase and misses some important context.
He went on to add that a brand is about what people recognize and it can be a large brand, medium brand or even a small brand (like this site). He added:
People recognize something (of whatever size) as standing out. And that in terms of search, that may *correlate* with signals we use to reward content.
You can try to go through the 14,000 ranking signals and find ones that may correlate.
Here is the post on X:
It's difficult to tell when things are quoted out of a live event if they are actually direct quotations or not. This, I suspect it's a paraphrase (could be wrong). But I given I talked at length at the event (and other things in the past) about how we're not somehow trying to…
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) April 1, 2025
Here is a screenshot of it:
So, really, not much of what he said here is new, but hey, I figured I'd cover it again.
Forum discussion at X.
Update: A bit more was added on this later today:
Sam, I gave these remarks at a live event. I'm pretty sure people who were there would agree that I actually was talking pretty fast, probably so much so that it can be hard to keep up. There wasn't a lot of "hmm, let me pause and consider how to answer that without answering…
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) April 2, 2025
Here is what Sullivan added:
Sam, I gave these remarks at a live event. I'm pretty sure people who were there would agree that I actually was talking pretty fast, probably so much so that it can be hard to keep up. There wasn't a lot of "hmm, let me pause and consider how to answer that without answering that."Which leads to what I was talking about. It's not that -- again -- we have some system that says "This is a brand and therefore rank that brand higher than some other brand." When I said in my follow-up post, "We don't have a brand-ranking system," it's difficult for me to understand what is supposedly me lying or obfuscating there. It's a pretty clear cut statement. Then again, if you are already predisposed to assume I'm lying, there's not a lot I can really add on that.
What I was talking about in my remarks is that there are all these things that people try to research to find that make them go "Look! Brand = better rankings!" That's not a surprising *correlation* but it's not the same as "Google calculates your brand and gave you X% brand boost."
What it means is if you've built a brand (of any size - my local pizza place as a local brand I recognize), something recognizable, something that people deliberately seek out and trust to the point of perhaps looking for you directly or going to you directly, you probably are doing a nice job with satisfying people generally. And our ranking systems are trying to reward sites by looking at a lot of signals we think align with that.
So if you're a site looking to set yourself apart from other sites that might be all offering similar things, commodity information, whatever -- you're one in a sea of choices, understanding how you stand out in that and build your brand (of whatever size, big, small, etc) is generally a good idea period -- overall -- completely independent of search.
And by doing that, you probably align with the things that search wants to reward (which is not to say our systems are perfect; they are not, and there are things we need to keep doing on our end which leads to well, this.
And over here:
The raters guidelines are written for raters to evaluate the quality of our results. We don't use those ratings directly in search. We talk about those guidelines as something creators might review if they want as part of a self-evaluation process, but it doesn't mean things in there are somehow directly tied to rank. I'd actually like to see us take a lot of the concept in the raters guide and redo them for just ordinary creators, written for those creators, as a more general guide.Which, we kind of do have here.
As for the whole specific thing on should you say about your site and who wrote what -- it comes back to are you doing things that readers and visitors to your site would want and expect? If so, good! See this section.
