Zyppy asked 131 SEO professionals which factors move Google rankings, and search intent, backlinks, and content quality came out on top

Zyppy, an SEO software firm founded by Cyrus Shepard, published its 2026 Google Ranking Factors Expert Survey on 9 September. It asked 131 SEO professionals to rate 103 potential ranking factors on a seven-point scale, gathering 13,665 ratings in total. Search Engine Land reported on the release the same day.

What the top of the list looks like

The three factors most respondents put in their top three: search intent and relevance at 57.1 percent, backlinks at 54.8 percent, and content quality third. Brand signals and user satisfaction sat close behind. Meta descriptions came near the bottom, with respondents reporting minimal perceived impact on ranking.

The list of factors seen as strongly negative is short: spammy backlinks, thin content, and AI content published at scale without added value.

Where AI content sits in the picture

The survey drew a sharp line inside the "AI content" bucket. Practitioners rated AI-generated writing more favorably when a human had reviewed and edited it and added something the reader could not get from a template: original research, first-party data, or specific expert judgment. Content published in volume with little added value received the strongest negative ratings among content-quality signals.

This is a survey of professional opinion. Every entry reflects what 131 people believe about a search system whose real ranking function is not published. The value of the numbers is in the pattern across a large enough sample of practitioners: original research and first-party data outrank scaled AI content in perceived impact, by a wide margin, in the group of people who work on this every day.

Two working conclusions

Two useful working conclusions come out of the survey, both of them consistent with what practitioners have been saying for the past year but now with a number behind them.

The first: the units of work that still move rankings are the ones with a person's judgment inside them. Original research, first-hand data, and content that answers a specific intent are the top of the list. A page assembled by a model from other people's writing sits at the negative end, not because AI is banned as an input but because there is nothing in it a reader could not find elsewhere for free.

The second: the ratio of technical to editorial work in a modern SEO program has moved. Technical SEO remains foundational, but the top-scoring factors are almost all editorial and demand-side: matching the intent, building the brand, earning links. A team whose entire SEO plan is technical audits and meta tag rewrites is spending most of its budget on the bottom half of the list.

For a marketing team pointing an editorial pipeline at Google and AI answer engines, the survey is the closest thing available to a checked list of what is worth spending time on. The full breakdown, including every factor scored and the negative signals, is in the Search Engine Land write-up and the Zyppy report it links to.

Source

Search Engine Land: Google's top ranking factors, according to 131 SEO professionals, 9 September 2026, reporting on Zyppy's 2026 Google Ranking Factors Expert Survey.