Google introduced RankBrain for around 15% of search queries in October 2015.
And, now Google is more confident about it and widely using RankBrain algorithm for every search query, which is directly impacting the rankings a lot.
The news evolved a few weeks earlier as a part of Steven Levy’s Backchannel story about Artificial Intelligence and machine learning efforts of Google. From the story, in account to RankBrain:
“Google is characteristically fuzzy on exactly how it improves search (something to do with the long tail? Better interpretation of ambiguous requests?), but Dean says that RankBrain is “involved in every query,” and affects the actual rankings “probably not in every query but in a lot of queries.”
What’s more, it’s hugely effective. Of the hundreds of “signals” Google search uses when it calculates its rankings (a signal might be the user’s geographical location, or whether the headline on a page matches the text in the query), RankBrain is now rated as the third most useful.”
It is well known that RankBrain is considered as the third most useful search ranking signal behind content and links. Last year, Google has publically announced that they are using RankBrain for a large fraction of 15% of search queries.
In short, one can say that Google is very much confident in RankBrain’s mysterious abilities that it can now be used for every query that are handled by them, approximately around a couple of trillion quires per year.
What is the role of RankBrain?
RankBrain is changing ranking for every query, but for a lot of queries, how can that be possible?
Actually Google is utilizing RankBrain as search refinement tool, and it seems that they are using it for every search in order to get better understanding about the queries. Another aspect of RankBrain might impact search results and its ranking, but not always.
Imagine that RankBrain looks for a search for “best schools in New York”. In such cases, RankBrain might understand it similar to other popular search queries, such as “best NY schools.” If so, then it is likely to translate the query to popular queries related to it, and then display ranking results in accordance with that. It can do that as for a more popular search query, Google undoubtedly has much more user data that helps RankBrain confident enough about the quality of the results.
Though RankBrain changed the ranking of search results, but it is done with different search not because it used any special ranking factor to alter the accurate listings appearing in the results.
Search engine giant said they are also using RankBrain as an actual ranking signal. Now, it becomes a cause of worry for SEO and search marketers, how to deal and tackle with RankBrain in order to show their content on the top of Google queries result. Answer is straight forward and simple nothing to do just focus on great content. RankBrain is ultimately designed to reward great contents. So, your focus should be delivering a best content, which is always true in SEO.