Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, said it again, that Google does not have a system to recognize if a site is run by a big brand and then automatically just ranks it higher. He said on X, “but no, we don’t have a brand-ranking system.”
I mean, not that most of you believe it, but Google has said this countless times over the years, including a few months ago.
Danny explained on X, after he felt he may have been misquoted at the Search Central Live NYC event:
I given I talked at length at the event (and other things in the past) about how we’re not somehow trying to detect a “brand” and then rank based on it being a big brand, small brand, whatever brand, it feels like a paraphrase and misses some important context.
He went on to add that a brand is about what people recognize and it can be a large brand, medium brand or even a small brand (like this site). He added:
People recognize something (of whatever size) as standing out. And that in terms of search, that may *correlate* with signals we use to reward content.
You can try to go through the 14,000 ranking signals and find ones that may correlate.
Here is the post on X:
It’s difficult to tell when things are quoted out of a live event if they are actually direct quotations or not. This, I suspect it’s a paraphrase (could be wrong). But I given I talked at length at the event (and other things in the past) about how we’re not somehow trying to…
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) April 1, 2025
Here is a screenshot of it:
So, really, not much of what he said here is new, but hey, I figured I’d cover it again.
Forum discussion at X.