Google Page Quality Explained: Lowest to Highest Ratings

Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines describe how human raters grade a web page's quality on a five-step scale from Lowest to Highest. Those ratings don't change any site's ranking directly; Google uses them to check whether its search systems are surfacing good results. The guidelines are still the most detailed public description of what Google means by "quality", and they map closely onto what an AdSense reviewer sees.

What the rater guidelines are

The Search Quality Rater Guidelines (officially "General Guidelines") are a long PDF that Google publishes and revises from time to time. At the time of writing, the public edition is dated 11 September 2025. Thousands of contracted raters around the world use it to score sample search results.

Two separate tasks appear in the document:

• Page Quality (PQ): how well a page achieves its purpose, judged on the page and the site it belongs to.
• Needs Met: how well a result answers a specific search query.

This guide is about Page Quality, because that is what overlaps with AdSense review. Google's helpful content guidance points site owners to the guidelines for self-assessment, while stressing that raters don't directly influence rankings.

The five ratings

Rating	Short description	Typical example
Lowest	Harmful, deceptive, spammy, or with no real purpose	Scraped or auto-generated pages with no added value; pages that hide who's responsible for harmful advice
Low	Weak main content, little effort or expertise for the purpose, or a mildly negative reputation	A 200-word "Top 10 laptops" list with no testing and stock descriptions
Medium	Achieves its purpose, nothing wrong, nothing special	A competent recipe with standard instructions
High	Satisfying main content, clear effort and skill, good reputation	A recipe tested with step photos, variations and troubleshooting
Highest	Very high E-E-A-T, very high effort or originality, excellent reputation	The definitive reference on a topic, by a recognised authority

Raters can also choose in-between values (Lowest+, Low+, Medium+, High+), so the scale is really nine steps. Approvalens uses the five named levels.

What raters look at

The guidelines ask raters to work through a page in a fixed order.

1. The purpose of the page

Every page should have a beneficial purpose: to inform, entertain, sell, share, help. Pages created mainly to make money without helping anyone, or to deceive, get the Lowest rating regardless of how polished they look.

2. Main content, supplementary content and ads

Raters separate the page into three parts:

• Main content (MC): the part that achieves the page's purpose, such as the article, the tool, the video.
• Supplementary content (SC): navigation, related links, sidebars.
• Ads and monetisation: clearly labelled ads are fine. Ads that cover the main content, push it far down or are disguised as content lower the rating.

That last point is shared with AdSense policy, which bans pages "with more ads or other paid promotional material than publisher-content" (answer/11112688).

3. Effort, originality, talent and skill

For the main content, raters judge how much effort went into it, whether it is original, and whether it shows skill. A page that copies, rephrases or lightly summarises other sources with no added value is a classic Low or Lowest.

4. Information about the website and content creator

Can a rater tell who is responsible for the site and who wrote the content? For a shop, is there customer service information? For a medical page, who wrote it and what qualifies them? This is where author pages and About and contact pages show up in the rating.

5. Reputation

Raters look for what others say about the site or creator: reviews, news coverage, professional recognition. For a small new blog there is often nothing; that's not a negative, it's simply neutral.

6. E-E-A-T

Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust, with trust as the most important. The level needed depends on the topic.

YMYL: when the bar goes up

"Your Money or Your Life" topics can significantly affect people's health, finances, safety or society. The guidelines apply stricter standards here. A Medium-quality page about houseplants and a Medium-quality page about insulin dosing are not held to the same standard.

Topic	YMYL?	What raises quality
Sourdough bread	No	Testing, photos, clear steps
Choosing a credit card	Yes (finance)	Accurate terms, sources, disclosed affiliate links
Child fever guidance	Yes (health)	Qualified author or reviewer, cited medical sources
Video game tips	No	First-hand play experience, specifics

What gets a page rated Lowest

The guidelines spend a lot of space on the bottom of the scale. Patterns that lead to Lowest include:

• Content that could harm people or that spreads demonstrably inaccurate information.
• Deceptive pages: fake functionality, disguised ads, misleading claims about who runs the site.
• Content copied or auto-generated with little effort or originality. The January 2025 revision added explicit language about mass-produced content, including generative AI output, with little added value.
• Pages that exist only to host ads.
• Hacked, defaced or abandoned sites with spam.

Many of these line up one-to-one with Google's spam policies and with the AdSense "low value content" rejection. See fixing low value content and thin content.

How this relates to AdSense review

AdSense reviewers are not search raters, and AdSense has its own policies. But the overlap is large:

• Both want original main content that serves a purpose.
• Both penalise pages dominated by ads or with no real content.
• Both value transparency about who runs the site.
• Both treat scaled, low-effort content as a problem.

A site where most pages would rate Medium or better is in a much stronger position than one where most pages would rate Low. That is why Approvalens rates each crawled page on the same five-level scale using deterministic checks (main content length and uniqueness, ad-to-content ratio, authorship signals, template repetition). Our methodology explains each signal and its limits.

Self-assessment questions

Pick five representative pages and ask:

1. What is this page for, and does it achieve that better than the top three search results?
2. Is there anything here I couldn't find elsewhere: a test, a photo, a number, an opinion from experience?
3. Can a stranger tell who wrote it and why they're qualified?
4. If it's YMYL, would I be comfortable with a doctor, lawyer or accountant reading it?
5. Are the ads secondary to the content on a phone screen?

If most answers are "no", the rating would likely be Low, whatever the word count.

Rate your own pages

A free scan gives each crawled page a Lowest-to-Highest estimate and shows which signals pulled it down.

FAQ

Do quality raters affect my rankings or AdSense approval?

Not directly. Rater scores are used to evaluate Google's search systems, not to rank or approve individual sites. The guidelines are useful because they describe what Google considers quality.

Is "Medium" good enough for AdSense?

Google doesn't publish a threshold. In practice, a site where most content pages are solid, original and transparent (Medium or better) has fewer of the problems that trigger "low value content".

Where can I read the guidelines?

Google publishes the PDF at guidelines.raterhub.com. It is long; the sections on Page Quality and E-E-A-T are the most relevant for publishers.

Can a tool really rate page quality?

Only approximately. Approvalens uses measurable proxies and labels the result as an estimate. Human judgement about accuracy, expertise and reputation can't be fully automated.