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Google Said:

“So we watch how people react to documents and memorize their responses.”

That is from a 2016 Google slide presented in the DOJ Antitrust trial. Later in that presentation, NavBoost is referred to as the Google Magic. For all the bluster about advanced tech, server farms, market reach, PageRank, a thousand patents, and over 100k coders – there *it* is – finally a confession out of Google that it’s magic is a simple log file analyzer. Yes Dorothy the wizard is only a man.

Consider another quote by Google:

“Can we scale up Machine Learning models to be better than NavBoost? We need a more thorough study of this, but as far as I can tell, none of these deep learning models are as powerful as NavBoost” – USDOJ Slide from Google.

Where would we restart a conversation about NavBoost? It seems like this topic has gotten knocked off the SEO radar due to a few things:

A) No new info has come out about it and it appears as though talking about it is just another rehash of the rehash.
B) SEO fatigue: SEO’s are so dug in pushing the signals they can push, that anything new has to come at us with a sustained scream level to get our attention.
C) Zero Click Paralysis: Site owners and SEO’s feel helpless to do anything. It appears Google holds most of the cards and is methodically taking away our last remaining few.
D) SEO’s not understanding the NavBoost confession is a seminal moment in SEO history. The general feeling appears to indicate that this is a signal that lives on Google’s side of the screen and we just can’t do anything about. (We are going to show that is very wrong.)

Lets start here: a few weeks ago a former senior exec Googler is quoted as saying:

On one hand, as a site owner I’ve rarely heard anything quite so offensive out of a former Google executive, and on the other, rarely have we heard such honesty out of one either.  The only real surprise here, is that we don’t hear more comments like that from former Googlers.

All of that was perking, while reading some minutia about the latest rankings update and I got a bit upset. See, I was stuck reading yet another irrelevant report on the random musings of a Google rep on the socials.  I thought, “Seriously people, we are talking about a site loading in 400 vs 900 milliseconds? It’s a rankings influence that might account for .0000000001% of the algo, while ignoring a metric (NavBoost) that may contribute to over 50% of our rankings!?”

It prompted me to take a fresh look at an issue that had been tasking me for quite awhile: NavBoost. Since this broke free in the USDOJ and States Vs Google antitrust case documents in 2023, yes it has fallen off the radar of SEO’s. Given how important this metric clearly is to Google rankings, I think we can push a ‘reset button‘ or ‘but wait there’s more‘ and take a deeper look at Navboost that it has not gotten in any major SEO piece. So in this multi-part series, we are going to look at what NavBoost is trying to accomplish and how SEO’s can push that signal.

Still note convinced of NavBoosts’ performance? How about it “stealing wins” from the entirety of the rest of the rankings algo:

Necessary Evil: Pushing NavBoost – In Three Parts

• Part One: NavBoost 2025: What’s it all about – lets make sure we are on the same page.
• Part Two : Clicks as UGC or what user data can we track on the Serps?
• Part Three: How Can we influence it? – Of course we can – it’s our job.

NavBoost = Crowd Sourced Rankings

It is that simple. Google’s NavBoost is primarily aimed at deducing what a user was actually searching for and connecting all the signals to provide results that service that user intention. They mine the collective intent of hundreds, thousands, if not millions of searches done each day to surface the “actual” site people are looking at. It is effective User Generated Content – and in this case the content is clicks.

I’ll say it a couple times in this series, this is the most telling Google statement I have reads since the original PageRank release:

“Not just one ranking system learns from search logs. Learning from logs is the main mechanism behind ranking. In addition to traditional systems, all major machine learning systems for ranking rely on logs: RankBrain, RankEmbed, DeepRank.” -Google Presentation

The question that is raised for SEO’s is also simple, can we influence it?. The answers is of course we can. There are many SEO shops playing with this over the last year and have gotten what they feel are good results. The biggest problem is the same problem we have with Google SEO in general: measuring results. Google has made quite a few significant updates to the SERPs over the last year, that moving A to see B change is a game of educated guessing. However; if you move a entire box full of A’s, and leave X’s pushing Y’s alone and later see that all the B’s change and the Y’s stay the same, you can bet what ever you did to A worked. Therefore, we know we can move the NavBoost needle.

We are not going to jump into the ethical questions about pushing this signal. Everything you do as an SEO is designed to push signals – NavBoost is another one.

The SEO world has long mud-wrestled around with what Google actually uses in its ranking systems. SEO’s have done everything from reverse engineering PageRank to hiring hordes of link builders. Just when we thought we’d seen it all a couple years ago, here comes NavBoost jumping out of the birthday cake to say “Surprise Surprise, but wait there’s more“!

It was Googles’ own internal presentation that laid out exactly the three parts to the main Google rankings theory:

It is curious to ponder that with all the documents available such as patents we can read, GitHub leaks we can snicker about, emails we can snoop on, and the testimonies we can slack jawed gawk at – that it honestly still feels like we are in the dark about the most important details. There is no shortage of SEO theories, but what we don’t know continues to massively overshadow what we assume we do know.

Over 1000 Ingredients and No Recipe in Sight

The rise of cute brand terms like NavBoost and Glue has only deepened the intrigue of The Google as a black box. All we really know, is that we are making Serps for dinner and we have the entire list of ingredients, but don’t have the recipe. I believe the disclosure of the existence of NavBoost is the most important revelation since the original Google leak: “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine itself.”

For some more background on NavBoost, I recommend these excellent  articles including NavBoost rundown by Marie Haynes, this brilliant wake up call by AJ Kohn, and this in-depth and comprehensive rundown by Danny Goodwin.

So lets take a reserved look at implications of NavBoost and dive into this while we try to remain on the “just the facts mam” side of SEO reality here. Where we are headed is that we will unpack the staggering number of possible signals that could be in play with NavBoost and Glue. We will also share results from a recent survey among search pros about trust, clicks, and just how far Google’s truth can be stretched before it breaks. After that is done, I will pull out my own SEO soap box, and have a go as well (all-the-while, trying to keep the out-of-bounds BS meter pegged at zero).

Part Two: Signal Overload: How NavBoost Rewrote the SEO Playbook

Brett Tabke

As the CEO and founder of Pubcon Inc., Brett Tabke has been instrumental in shaping the landscape of online marketing and search engine optimization. His journey in the computer industry has spanned over three decades and has made him a pioneering force behind digital evolution. Full Bio
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