Here’s something Google says about your website that most business owners have never heard.
They score every page you publish on something called “effort.”
And here’s the part that’ll surprise you: effort isn’t word count. It isn’t how many hours you spent. It isn’t even whether a human wrote it instead of AI.
Hi, I’m Jeff Payne. You’re listening to The Jeff Payne Show, Episode 61: The Effort Google Can See.
So what is Google actually measuring? And how can a machine possibly know the difference between a page you cared about and a page you didn’t?
Stick with me. Because I found out the hard way — at 11 o’clock last night.
For close to 20 years, Google has trained something called Quality Raters — real people, paid to evaluate the same signals the algorithm eventually learns to detect on its own. And one of the core things they’re trained to score is effort.
Not effort like a report card. Effort like: did a human being actually work to make this page useful, or does it just look like content?
Google’s own Quality Rater Guidelines put it plainly: Consider the extent to which a human being actively worked to create satisfying content. And they say it isn’t close to a fringe idea — effort shows up in that guidance well over a hundred times.
Which raises the obvious question. If Google can’t watch you write the page — if they don’t know how many hours you put in — how do they score something that subjective?
Here’s the answer, and it’s the part that changes how you should think about your website.
Google doesn’t score the effort you put in. They score the evidence of that effort that’s left behind on the page.
That distinction matters enormously. You can work for eight hours on a page and leave zero evidence of it. You can also — and this is the dangerous part — generate a page with almost no work at all, and if it’s dressed up well enough, it can look like effort. Google is explicit that they’re trying to see through that.
So what does the evidence actually look like? A few patterns keep showing up in Google’s own guidance.
A page that’s been genuinely curated and edited — organized around what the reader actually needs — reads differently than a page that’s just a pile of information someone assembled. A page with original facts and a real point of view reads differently than one that recycles what’s already sitting on twenty other sites. And a page built around first-hand experience — something the person actually did, tested, saw, or lived through — reads differently than a summary of other people’s claims.
None of that is about length. A short page with real evidence of a human paying attention will outscore a long page that’s technically accurate but generic.
And here’s the detail I think matters most for this audience: Google isn’t just guessing at this anymore. Their own leaked technical documentation shows a field that estimates content effort using AI, at scale, across the web. This isn’t a rater’s gut feeling. It’s becoming a measured, systematic signal.
I’ll tell you exactly where this hit home for me, because it happened last night, not months ago.
I was reviewing a piece of content one of our writers had put together, already edited by our copy editor, and my job was to get it ready to hand off to my designer and developer. I spent about three hours on it. Not writing from scratch — refining. The tables. The FAQ section. How a reader would actually move through the page. The schema markup. The internal links. Making sure every piece of it earned its place before it went out the door.
And while I was in that mode — thinking about what “evidence of effort” actually looks like on a page — I looked at our own site with fresh eyes, and I found a gap.
We have a client with over 55 product pages. Not one of them showed who was actually behind the information. No author. No name. No face. Just information, floating there, with no human attached to it.
We fixed it that night. Every product page now shows the actual person responsible for that product’s information — their name, their photo. Not for decoration. Because it’s true, and because it’s exactly the kind of evidence Google is describing: a real human being stood behind this page and put their name on it.
That’s a small change. It took one evening. But it’s the difference between a page that merely contains information and a page that shows someone cared enough to be accountable for it.
Here’s how this connects to something I’ve said on this show before: Proof Over Proximity. Durable authority doesn’t come from tricks or proximity signals. It comes from real, verifiable evidence that a real person or business actually did the work.
What this episode adds to that idea is why it holds up algorithmically, not just strategically. Google isn’t rewarding proof because it’s a nice storytelling device. They’re rewarding it because proof is, quite literally, the evidence of effort they’re built to detect.
Which means the businesses paying what I call the Proving Tax — the ones without documented outcomes, real names attached to real work, first-hand experience visible on the page — aren’t just missing a marketing opportunity. They’re actively scoring lower on a signal Google has been refining for two decades.
So here’s the question worth sitting with today. Walk through your own website — not as the owner, as a stranger. Could someone tell a real human being was behind each page? Or does it read as if it were assembled?
That’s it. That’s the whole audit. You don’t need a scorecard for it. You need to look honestly.
If this one made you think differently about your own site, do me a favor — subscribe to the show wherever you’re listening, whether that’s Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or TrueFans, and leave us a five-star rating and a review. It genuinely helps more people find this show.
I’m Jeff Payne. I’ll see you next time.
Google scores every page you publish on “effort.” It’s not word count, and it’s not how long you spent. Here’s what it actually is — and what one late-night editing session taught me about my own website.
THE SIGNAL NOBODY TALKS ABOUT
For close to 20 years, Google has trained human Quality Raters to evaluate web pages against a set of standards — and one of the core standards is “effort.” Not effort as a vague notion of hard work, but effort as something Google’s guidelines define, illustrate, and reference well over 100 times.
Their own Quality Rater Guidelines describe it as considering “the extent to which a human being actively worked to create satisfying content.” And according to reporting on Google’s leaked API documentation, this isn’t just a rater’s subjective impression anymore — there’s a field that estimates content effort using AI, at scale.
What effort actually is — and isn’t
Here’s the distinction that changes everything: Google isn’t scoring how much time or effort you actually invested. They’re scoring the evidence of that investment that survives on the finished page.
That means a page can take eight hours to write and still show zero evidence of effort. And a page assembled quickly, if it’s dressed up well, can superficially resemble effort — which is exactly why Google has spent over two decades sharpening its ability to tell the difference.
The pattern across Google’s guidance points to a few consistent things: content that’s genuinely curated and organized around the reader’s needs, original perspectives rather than recycled information, and firsthand experience — something the creator actually did, tested, or lived through, rather than summarized from elsewhere.
Effort isn’t how much work you put into a page. It’s the evidence of that work that’s left behind on it.
This is one of the best written, most informative email newsletters I’ve ever read!
Thank you for sharing your expertise, and hope you’re doing well.
Beth Zimmerman
Founder, Executive Director
What one late night taught me
I spent three hours last night refining a piece of content one of our writers and our copy editor had already worked on — tightening the tables, the FAQ, the flow, the schema, the internal links — before it went to my designer and developer.
In the middle of that, I looked at one of our client sites and noticed something: across more than 55 product pages, not one showed who was actually behind the information. We fixed it that night.
Every product page now carries the name and photo of the real person responsible for it — not as decoration, but because it’s true, and because it’s precisely the kind of on-page evidence Google is describing.
The businesses without documented proof aren’t just missing a marketing opportunity — they’re scoring lower on a signal Google has spent over two decades refining.
THE QUESTION WORTH ASKING
Walk through your own website like a stranger would. Could they tell a real human being was behind each page — or does it read as if it were assembled?
A short page with real evidence of a human paying attention will outscore a long page that’s technically accurate but generic.
Source: “Content Effort: The Google Ranking Signal Nobody Talks About” by Cyrus Shepard, Zyppy Signal. Cyrus Shepard is a former Google Quality Rater.
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