DECODING THE GOOGLE LEAK What It Means for SEO in 2026 Shaun Anderson • SMX Paris • March 9th 2026 

PART 1 35 min The New Canon of SEO Truth - decoding 14,014 attributes PART 2 12 min Evidence-based roadmap - Contextual SEO & the Agentic Web PART 3 8 min Case study - testing the framework with multi-agent automation CLOSE 5 min Key takeaways - from conjecture to certainty 

PART 1: THE NEW CANON OF SEO TRUTH Decoding the 14,014 leaked attributes 

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SECTION 1: TRUST The Gate 

TRUST E-E-A-T Is Not a Ranking Factor. It Is a Ranking Reality. Layer What It Is E-E-A-T The goal — Google’s doctrine codified. Q* - Q-Star The system — the machine that measures it. site_quality The score — the number your site gets. “E-E-A-T is the goal. Q* is the system. Site quality is the score.” 

TRUST SegIndexer - You’re Tiered Before You Rank Tier What It Means Base High-quality - eligible to compete. Zeppelins Mid-tier - limited visibility. Landfills Low-quality - effectively filtered out before ranking begins. scaledSelectionTierRank determines your position. “A new, low-authority blog might be filtered out before its content is ever deeply evaluated. This is the algorithmic glass ceiling.” 

TRUST Dwell Time & CTR “Dwell time, CTR, whatever Fishkin’s new theory is, those are generally made up CRAP. Search is much more simple than people think.” Gary Ilyes, Google - 2019 Reddit Thread 

TRUST The CRAPS System & Navboost “Google doesn’t rank pages. Users rank pages. Google just counts.” • 13-month window of aggregated click data • GoodClicks, BadClicks, lastLongestClicks, unsquashedClicks • CRAPS = Click and Results Prediction System • chromeInTotal: Chrome data → Popularity (P*) signal • DOJ trial confirmed: Chrome browser data is a direct ranking input 

TRUST Goldmine — The Title Weapon • goldmineNavboostFactor: bad title → poor clicks → demotion • goldmineBodyFactor: title must align with content • goldmineUrlMatchFactor: title must align with URL • goldmineHeaderIsH1: special weight for the H1 tag “Your title isn’t chosen. It’s elected. The voters are your anchors, your content, and your click data.” 

TRUST The Clutter Tax “One bad pop-up can, theoretically tank your entire domain.” • clutterScore: scaled, smeared across entire domain (isSmearedSignal) • violatesMobileInterstitialPolicy: boolean kill switch • adsDensityInterstitialViolationStrength: 0–1000 severity • pandaDemotion: site-wide penalty = ‘algorithmic debt’ 

TRUST Trust Checklist Task Signal One-Liner Spam & Deception scamness, spamrank, GibberishScore Are you clean? Sandbox hostAge, documentHistory Leak: ‘sandbox fresh spam’ Technical Trust badSslCertificate, forwardingdup HTTPS + clean canonicals Local Verification brickAndMortarStrength Your building is a signal Content Integrity ContentChecksum96, pandaDemotion No duplicates, no thin content 

SECTION 2: EXPERIENCE 

EXPERIENCE Content Effort - The LLM-Driven Engine Signal What It Measures Why It Matters contentEffort Replication difficulty (LLM-based) Can a competitor reproduce this trivially? OriginalContentScore Source vs. summariser Are you the origin or the echo? original_media_score Original vs. stock images Did you actually photograph this? BlockBERT Semantic depth Does your content have conceptual density? “Google can now measure — with a score — whether you actually tried. This is the most important shift for content strategy in 2026.” 

EXPERIENCE Graffiti vs Authority “What you SAY you are on your own site is graffiti to Google.” • isAuthor, authorObfuscatedGaiaStr: entity-level author tracking. • Google inherently distrusts user input - ‘no better than graffiti’. • Claims are worthless until repeated on authoritative domains. • By tracking authors, Google builds a machine-readable experience profile. “The real E-E-A-T signal is when someone ELSE says you’re an expert - and links to you.” 

EXPERIENCE Freshness, CWV & Media Signals • lastSignificantUpdate: major revision ≠ minor edit (Google knows the difference) • VersionedFloatSignal: your quality trajectory over time • mobileCwv, desktopCwv: stored per-URL, used directly • productReviewPUhqPage: Ultra High Quality product reviews rewarded “Google tracks your quality trajectory — are you getting better or worse?” 

SECTION 3: EXPERTISE The Depth 

EXPERTISE The Site Focus Signal - Topical Authority Quantified • site2vecEmbeddingEncoded: your entire site as a vector in semantic space • siteFocusScore: how niche you are — quantified • siteRadius: how far you drift from your core topic “Google takes every page, averages the embeddings, and measures the radius. The tighter your radius, the higher your focus score.” Strategy: go deeper, not wider. Every off-topic page dilutes your focus. 

EXPERTISE Signal Coherence - The ABC of Topicality Signal Source Role A — Anchors sourceOnsiteAnchor, sourceOffdomainAnchor What others say you’re about B — Body goldmineBodyFactor What your content says C — Clicks goldmineNavboostFactor What users vote for “When A, B, and C align — that’s signal coherence.” 

EXPERTISE QBST, Entities & YMYL • QBST: Query-Based Salient Terms - concepts Google expects on a good page • webrefEntities: Knowledge Graph annotations • asteroidBeltIntents: granular intent classification • onsiteProminence: simulated user traffic flow through internal links • chard: initial YMYL content predictor • ymylHealthScore, ymylNewsScore: specialised stricter evaluation 

SECTION 4: AUTHORITATIVENESS The Reputation 

AUTHORITATIVENESS Authoritativeness Is Not a Feeling. It’s a Floating-Point Number. • siteAuthority: confirmed in the leak — it’s real • authorityPromotion boost vs unauthoritativeScore penalty • predictedDefaultNsr: a VersionedFloatSignal — your trajectory over time • PageRank-NearestSeeds: modern PageRank evolution • queriesForWhichOfficial: the queries you “own” • isLargeChain, siteSiblings: entity scale & brand signals “Algorithmic momentum: a site with a long, consistent history of quality becomes harder to dislodge.” 

E-E-A-T Decoded E-E-A-T Primary Machine-Readable Proxies Strategic Imperative Experience contentEffort, originalContentScore, isAuthor, lastSignificantUpdate High-effort, attributable content with original media Expertise siteFocusScore, siteRadius, site2vec, QBST, EntityAnnotations Topically focused sites, clearly defined entities Authoritativeness siteAuthority, PageRank, authorityPromotion, queriesForWhichOfficial Links from trusted sources, build author entities Trust GoodClicks/BadClicks, clutterScore, scamness, pandaDemotion Clean UX, verify identity, optimise for satisfaction Table 3.1 from E-E-A-T Decoded — hobo-web.co.uk 

The Ranking Pipeline Relevance Systems (Fast) Quality Systems (Slow) Mustang → initial scoring Q* → trustworthiness ceiling T* (Topicality): ABC signals NavBoost → 13-month click reranking P* (Popularity): Chrome data Twiddlers → editorial final layer Can find you in hours Can catch you in months “White hat SEO is not a philosophy. It’s a survival strategy.” 

SEO Audits in 2026 “No human being can audit all of this. Not manually. Not at scale.” So what’s the roadmap? 

PART 2: THE EVIDENCE-BASED ROADMAP FOR 2026 Contextual SEO & the Agentic Web 

E-E-A-T Is Not a Checklist. It’s Contextual. “You can’t sprinkle some experiences on your web pages. That doesn’t make any sense.” — John Mueller, Google 

The Context Stack Know / Do / Website / Visit 1. Query Class YMYL / Soft-YMYL / Non-YMYL 2. Risk Profile 3. Expectation Baseline What a reasonable user expects Brand / Publisher / Retailer / Individual 4. Entity Role 5. Proportional E-E-A-T Minimum → Competitive → Dominant Quality is judged relative to context, not ideals. 

Do You Need E-E-A-T? It Depends. Scenario Context What Google Cares About Cat Gifs (Non-YMYL) Fun, no risk Everyday expertise sufficient Medical Advice (YMYL) Health, high risk Qualified authors, citations E-Commerce (YMYL) Taking credit cards scamness, refund policies “Are you offering “expert” advice? Then, yes!” 

Google Quality Raters Guide 

Healthy Entity 

The Hypocrisy Penalty Traps ‘Expert-reviewed’ on About Us but 500 AI posts/day, with zero editing? scamness + unauthoritativeScore “Make sure your website policies reflect your business reality.” 

Spam 

Disconnected Entity 

Correction Algorithms 

PART 3: CASE STUDY Testing the framework with multi-agent automation 

The Agentic Web Is Here Event What It Means Chrome auto-browse (Gemini 3) Browsers navigate without you Agentic AI: $4.5B → $76.8B by 2034 The next platform shift MCP + A2A Protocol Agent-to-agent standards shipping “We are not approaching the Agentic Web. We are IN the Agentic Web.” 

CASE STUDY Testing the Framework 4 weeks • 1 developer • The Marketing Cyborg Technique • Multi-agent orchestration (cf. LangChain, CrewAI, AutoGPT) • Agents accumulate domain expertise over time • DAG pipeline: audit → compliance → legal → human • 6-layer grounding to prevent hallucination 

CASE STUDY Reducing hallucination in multi-agent systems 6-Layer Grounding Architecture Layer What It Does 1. Grounding Directive Agents can only reference crawled URLs 2. Crawled HTML Actual HTML injected — not summaries 3. Performance Data Real GSC + GA4 data 4. Live Search Cited competitive intelligence 5. Expert Knowledge Domain-specific knowledge bases 6. Deep Research Upgraded reasoning + search grounding An approach any team building agentic systems should consider. 

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CASE STUDY Running A Full Quality Audit Autonomously Dial Leak Signal What’s Happening Content Effort contentEffort LLM replication difficulty Site Focus siteFocusScore Topical authority measured Legitimacy scamness, spamrank Spam classifiers EEAT isAuthor, siteAuthority Authorship, brand signals Q* Composite ALL The master quality score Contextual SEO in practice — YMYL agent applies stricter evaluation. 

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THE NEW CANON OF SEO TRUTH 

The Virtuous Cycle of Quality 1. Build Expertise → high siteFocusScore, deep original content 2. Attracts links → builds siteAuthority (Authoritativeness) 3. Authority earns visibility → users click 4. Good clicks → Trust signals to NavBoost 5. Trust reinforces Authority → cycle compounds A weakness in one area suppresses the others. This is a holistic system, not a checklist. 

The Evidence-Based Roadmap Action Why Audit your Content Effort Can your content be trivially replicated? Measure your Site Focus How tight is your topical radius? Build temporal trust Quality trajectory matters. Be patient. Apply Contextual SEO Proportional E-E-A-T based on context Prepare for the Agentic Web Agents are coming. Expertise is the moat. 

The Signals That Matter Most Signal What It Means For You contentEffort Invest in content that’s hard to replicate siteFocusScore Go deeper, not wider siteAuthority Consistent quality compounds over time Q* Your site has a trust score before anyone searches Contextual SEO Proportional standards, not universal checklists Move from conjecture to certainty. 

White hat SEO is not a philosophy. It’s a survival strategy in 2026. “AI increases supply. Trust controls demand. E-E-A-T is how real websites survive abundance.” 

Merci beaucoup, Paris @Hobo_Web