Passage ranking (2021): what it changed and what it means now

What Google changed#

Google announced passage ranking on 15 October 2020 in its Search On post. It wrote that “the single sentence that answers your question might be buried deep in a web page,” and that it could now “better understand the relevancy of specific passages.” By understanding passages as well as the overall page, Google said it could surface an answer from a page that covers a broader topic.

Search Engine Roundtable noted that the feature was formerly known as passage indexing. Google ranks the passages separately, but the page is still indexed as a whole, and passage results do not look any different from other results.

When it rolled out#

Google gave no launch date in 2020. On 11 February 2021 Google’s Danny Sullivan said on X, as quoted by Search Engine Roundtable, that passage ranking “launched yesterday afternoon Pacific Time for queries in the US in English.” He added that it would come to more countries in English and then to other languages.

Google did not state when it finished rolling out to other countries or languages, so this page has no completion date. The Danny Sullivan account that posted the launch has since been deleted.

What is known about its impact#

Google’s only figure is from its 2020 announcement: “This technology will improve 7 percent of search queries across all languages as we roll it out globally.” That figure describes the global rollout, not the first US English launch. Google did not publish site-level impact data.

What site owners should do#

Passage ranking is still in use. Google’s ranking systems guide describes it as “an AI system we use to identify individual sections or ‘passages’ of a web page.” There is nothing to switch on, and no markup targets it. Google’s helpful content guidance is what applies:

• Give the page a main heading that is a descriptive, helpful summary of the content.
• Cover the topic substantially, so a reader does not need to search again elsewhere.
• Do not write to a word count; Google says it has no preferred word count.
• Write for people first; Google’s guidance warns against content made mainly to rank.

How to check whether it affected you#

Search Console keeps 16 months of data, so its reports no longer cover February 2021. Use archived analytics or rank tracking exports and look for long pages that began to rank for specific, detailed queries after 10 February 2021. The Google Algorithm Updates timeline lists the other updates of that period so you can rule them out first.

Related updates#

• BERT was the language understanding system Google launched before it.
• RankBrain is an earlier AI system that relates words to concepts.
• The December 2020 core update was the core update before its launch.