Danny Sullivan, Google's Search Liaison, said something that is probably somewhat obvious to many of the readers here, that SGE is not able to tell you how Google's search ranking systems work, what scores or ranking factors it does or does not use, or any of that. SGE learns from the web, not from secret algorithms that are not public for the LLMs to learn off of.
Danny wrote on X, "SGE is *not* showing what the Google Search ranking systems think of a site, nor do overviews include information that comes from our internal ranking systems...."
The question was asked by Jared Bauman who posted this example on X, saying, "With the release of Gemini AI, you can now get an even better idea of exactly WHAT Google thinks of your website."
With the release of Gemini AI, you can now get an even better idea of exactly WHAT Google thinks of your website.
— jared bauman (@jaredbauman) December 7, 2023
I was consulting yesterday (for a site that got hit by the HCU) and stumbled upon a new type of SGE result.
Google literally told me they did not trust the site... pic.twitter.com/JvvxC68UMO
Sullivan replied that no, that is not coming from a Google source. He said, "SGE is *not* showing what the Google Search ranking systems think of a site, nor do overviews include information that comes from our internal ranking systems...."
"Looking at your examples, I'm pretty sure SGE didn't automatically display any of these summaries, because the system didn't think that would be helpful," he added.
He said on to add:
SGE can, of course, be triggered manually. It's then going to give you an AI-generated overview. These overviews do not somehow go into our internal systems to show any ranking insights.Overviews are also accompanied by links that help you understand out a particular point might be corroborated. These are available using the little arrows in your screenshots -- they look like this: ⌄
If you click on those, it should become pretty clear things like "low trust score" are not things coming somehow from internal Google Search ranking systems.
As for About This Result, it also does not tell you if Google "trusts" a site nor does it show any internal ranking data. It simply shows information our systems find from across the web and other sources so that people can better evaluate a particular results. More about what is shown is explained here.
How fun would that be if AI could really tell us how Google's ranking systems work... To be fair, this question came up when Bard launched too.
Forum discussion at X.
