Google Says Again, Personalization In Search Is Extremely Light & Rare For Ranking

Google’s Danny Sullivan confirmed, again, that personalization in Google Search is an “extremely light” ranking signal. In fact, he said personalization is “fairly rare” to be used for ranking purposes.

Danny is confirming what he said back in 2018 when he said personalization in search is a very light signal. This is outside of geo/location personalization, which is used for tons of queries. But for previous searches, search history and what information Google has about your likes, dislikes and demographics is not really used to make the search results better for you.

Today, in 2021, Danny said “it’s extremely light, actually fairly rare, when it comes to results themselves actually having a ranking change.”

So it is unlikely you would see personalization do much of anything to impact the Google Search rankings.

Here are those tweets:

It’s extremely light, actually fairly rare, when it comes to results themselves actually having a ranking change.

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) August 19, 2021

Forum discussion at Twitter.