Google’s RankBrain update puzzles a lot of people. Google never published a handbook explaining exactly what it does, but the SEO world has pieced together enough to show how it works and how it changed search. The good news: if you’re already practicing good SEO, your site probably won’t suffer because of RankBrain. Still, it helps to know how RankBrain can affect you and what you should do to keep ranking well on the largest search engine on the web.
Launch Date: October 26, 2015
RankBrain is a machine-learning part of Google’s Hummingbird algorithm. It returns more relevant results by reading user intent in a way that’s closer to how a person would read it. Google said RankBrain was its third most important ranking signal, so it has a big hand in how Google sorts through queries.
Which sites RankBrain affected
RankBrain’s job is to “think” on Google’s behalf when it reads a query, so being “targeted” by it can actually work in your favor:
Unknown queries
Of all the ways RankBrain can touch your site, this is the best case. RankBrain interprets queries Google hasn’t seen before and sends searchers to the pages it thinks will best meet their needs. You can’t control which unfamiliar queries people type into the search box. If your content answers them well, though, RankBrain works to your advantage.
Outside of unknown queries, the other ways RankBrain can affect you don’t help. Like every other Google update and every other change Google makes to search, RankBrain exists to keep pages out of the top of the SERPs when they don’t give searchers helpful, relevant information and a good experience on the page. Here are the reasons RankBrain might pull your rankings down:
Low-quality content
If visitors leave your site disappointed, expect RankBrain to drop your rankings. Because RankBrain is part of Google’s Hummingbird algorithm, it rewards sites whose content solves the problem a searcher came with. If your pages don’t offer those answers, you could lose rankings to other pages that do.
Poor user experience
If your site is slow, hard to use or doesn’t help visitors, high rankings will be hard to keep. As with Google’s other updates, RankBrain weighs the experience you give people and ranks your pages to match. RankBrain was also smarter than the updates that came before it, which left weak sites even more exposed to losing Google rankings and traffic.
How RankBrain works
When Google announced RankBrain in 2015, it was the first machine-learning system Google used to rank search results. (Later systems, BERT among them, joined it.) RankBrain’s first job was handling queries Google didn’t recognize, including searches nobody had typed before. Those come up more than you’d guess: about 15 percent of the searches Google sees each day are brand new.
That stat sounds odd at first. But think of all the different ways someone can phrase a question, and all the different people using Google, and it isn’t so surprising that Google runs into so many unfamiliar queries. This is where RankBrain does its best work. Put simply, RankBrain is the part of Google’s algorithm that finds the best match for a search, even when Google isn’t sure what the query means.
Google first described RankBrain as a tool for brand-new queries. By 2016, though, Google had confirmed that RankBrain was involved in processing every search, not only the unfamiliar ones.
How to adjust your site for RankBrain
The best way to do well with RankBrain is to write good, useful content. Many of the queries RankBrain handles are ones nobody has searched before, and that set keeps changing. So don’t write in the hope that RankBrain picks up your keywords. Optimizing for a query nobody is searching for is like chasing the wind; you can’t catch it.
You don’t optimize for this update directly. Instead, write content that uses the words and phrases people actually search for. The easiest way to do that is to write naturally. Read your content out loud: does it sound like something your target audience would say? If it does, you’ve done your job. Since RankBrain is part of how Google reads every search, natural writing is the best preparation you can make, and there’s no separate RankBrain checklist to follow.
What RankBrain changed about search
RankBrain gave Google’s results a more human reading of what people mean. Google can now pick up the nuances behind a query, even one it has never seen before, and work out what the searcher is looking for. It’s no secret that Google’s algorithm keeps getting “smarter.” RankBrain is one of the ways Google uses its updates to give people the best search results it can, and if you write for your readers, it’s on your side.