The new ranking factors survey from Cyrus and Dawn Shepard at Zyppy is a helpful glimpse into the actual factors that impact Google’s ranking algorithms right now, and the findings don’t deliver any unexpected shocks. The top three positions on the list among the professionals polled were: relevance, backlinks, and content quality.

The Top Tier: What Matters Most?

Content relevance, inbound links, and content quality make up the core of ranking factors, and each gets more than 45% of all votes from the respondents. Relevance is when the content semantically matches and meets the user’s actual search intent, rather than matching keywords or only a random part of it.

Although the importance of backlinks has been long debated, they are still very relevant. While Gary Illyes has confirmed that links are not a top three ranking factor for Google, 54.8% of the experts surveyed said links are a top three ranking factor, and that links from trusted, matching, high-traffic pages have the highest value, while spammy links have a negative effect.

The area where Content Quality is changing.

A change of note in this year’s survey concerns the meaning of ‘quality’ in practice. Original research and first-party data were the most prominent quality signals, highlighting the increasing focus on unique and non-commodity content in an AI-driven content landscape. Indeed, AI has made publishing so affordable that there is no better alternative than quality, as one contributor pointed out.

The Middle and Lower tiers will be the ones to suffer.

Trust and authority, behavioral click signals, and brand presence were each chosen by 25–40% of respondents, followed by user satisfaction, technical SEO, topical authority, and internal linking, which were chosen by fewer than 20%.

Many of the issues have polarizing opinions, interestingly. Another expert said that they were overrated in some ways because any page loads OK or it doesn’t, but a third expert said that speed is far more important on a large ecommerce site than on, say, a local business site, so it wasn’t an obvious winner.

In the digital world, AI-generated content is not all bad. AI-Generated Content:

But opinions about the use of AI-generated content were not entirely negative: For at least one respondent, high-quality AI content that was supplemented with substantial unique material and editing by a human achieved good results. This distinction is important: it’s not that AI is involved in the process, but whether it brings meaningful value to the results.

As a web owner, what does this mean to you?

While not necessarily different from previous years, but with some additional refinement of the strategy: focus on content that directly addresses search intent, build more high-quality backlinks from relevant and trusted sites, and increasingly rely on original research or first-party data, not content that is a commodity or could be written by anyone. Technical fundamentals remain important, but they are a minimum level of requirement, not a differentiator.

FAQs

1. What are the 3 most important Google ranking factors for the 2026 survey?

Content relevance, backlinks, and content quality were the three highest in terms of popularity, with over 45% of surveyed SEO professionals choosing them.

2. What are the best practices for using backlinks in 2026?

Yes. Even though their importance was expected to wane, backlinks came in as the second most important factor, particularly if they are from trusted and relevant high-traffic pages.

3. Is the content created by AI detrimental to SEO rankings?

Not inherently. The survey revealed that people did not like AI-generated content primarily when it was done in bulk without significant human involvement, but liked content that was created with AI but edited by humans.

4. Has website speed dropped to become less of a ranking factor?

Opinions are divided. There’s some smart people out there who say Core Web Vitals are “overrated,” as long as a page loads “okay”. But others believe it’s important to consider speed for some sites more than others, such as ecommerce stores with a lot of products.

5. Which type of content is successful with the newer ranking criteria?

As AI-generated content becomes more affordable and accessible, original research and first-party data are becoming more valued, as Google prioritizes fresh, original content over what can be easily generated.