The Facts About Google Click Signals, Rankings, And SEO

Clicks as a ranking-related signal have been a subject of debate for over twenty years, although nowadays most SEOs understand that clicks are not a direct ranking factor. The simple truth about clicks is that they are raw data and, surprisingly, processed with some similarity to human rater scores.

Clicks Are A Raw Signal

The DOJ Antitrust memorandum opinion from September 2025 mentions clicks as a “raw signal” that Google uses. It also categorizes content and search queries as raw signals. This is important because a raw signal is the lowest-level data point which is processed into higher level ranking signals or used for training a model like RankEmbed and its successor, RankEmbedBERT.

Those are considered raw signals because they are:

• Directly observed
• But not yet interpreted or used for training data

The DOJ document quotes professor James Allan, who gave expert testimony on behalf of Google:

“Signals range in complexity. There are “raw” signals, like the number of…