What the Google leak and the antitrust documents revealed about links

Two bodies of evidence now sit behind most serious claims about how Google treats links. One is sworn testimony and exhibits from the US antitrust case against Google. The other is internal API documentation that leaked in 2024. They are not equally strong, and most of the bad advice written since comes from treating them as if they were.

This page sorts the link findings into four grades: confirmed, documented, inferred and speculative.

The two sources and how much weight each can bear

The antitrust case. The liability trial in US v. Google ran from September to November 2023, and the court ruled on 5 August 2024 that Google was an illegal monopolist. A remedies trial began on 21 April 2025, with the remedies opinion on 2 September 2025. Testimony was given under oath and the exhibits are Google’s own material, so this is primary evidence.

The leak. Documentation for Google’s Content Warehouse API, more than 2,500 pages covering 14,014 attributes, was published to GitHub by mistake in March 2024. Rand Fishkin and Mike King made it public on 27 May 2024. According to press reports at the time, Google confirmed the documents were real within days and warned against drawing conclusions from information that was out of context, outdated or incomplete.

The limit of the leak matters more than its size. It lists data fields and modules. It contains no weights, no scoring functions and no proof that any field is used in production. Some fields are marked deprecated and many carry no status at all.

Grade	What it means	Where it comes from
Confirmed	Stated in sworn testimony or a court exhibit	Antitrust case
Documented	A field exists in the leaked docs; use and weight unknown	The leak
Inferred	An analyst’s reading of what a field implies	Commentary on the leak
Speculative	No document supports it directly	Commentary

What the court documents confirm

The clearest material comes from an interview with a Google engineer, entered as an exhibit and reported by Search Engine Journal on 15 May 2025. Our quotes come from that report, not from our own reading of the exhibit.

• Relevance is built from three things. Google’s topicality score combines anchors, body text and clicks, in what the exhibit calls a “relatively hand-crafted way”.
• PageRank feeds quality. The exhibit describes PageRank as “a single signal relating to distance from a known good source” and as “an input to the Quality score”.
• Quality is mostly a property of the site. The quality score, described as “the notion of trustworthiness”, is “incredibly important” and “generally static across multiple queries”.
• Signals are mostly built by hand. “The vast majority of signals are hand-crafted”, so that engineers know what to fix when something breaks.
• Chrome data is used in a popularity signal.

Separately, Pandu Nayak testified on 18 October 2023 that a system called Navboost uses 13 months of click data, down from 18, and is one of the important signals. Other testimony and an exhibit on the life of a click show that clicks are used heavily in ranking, which contradicts years of public messaging.

For link builders the confirmed picture is simple. A link acts in two places: its anchor text feeds relevance to a query, and PageRank, measured as distance from trusted seed sites, feeds trust in the site. Clicks are a third pillar that links cannot replace.

What the leak documents

The items below exist in the leaked documentation. We describe what each field does and do not print field names, because the exact spellings have not been checked against a copy of the original files.

What the documentation describes	What analysts infer from it
A site-level authority value stored with other quality signals	Google has a sitewide authority concept, despite denying that it uses “domain authority”
A quality bucket on each anchor (high, medium or low) tied to the index tier of the linking page	Links from pages in the top tier are worth more; links from the lowest tier may be ignored
The homepage’s seed-based PageRank copied to every page on the site	A new page starts with the homepage’s authority as a default
A demotion for anchor mismatch	Anchors that do not fit the target, or links from off-topic sources, can be demoted or ignored
Counts of spam-phrase anchors, how fast they appeared, the start and end of the spike and how many were demoted	Sudden bursts of similar anchors are measured and the anchors inside the burst can be discounted. The same mechanism would blunt negative SEO attacks
Penguin-era anchor statistics, including counts of dropped anchors	Penguin logic still lives in the anchor pipeline, and it drops anchors instead of punishing pages
Trust flags on link targets and counts of trusted anchors	Trusted sources are protected and their links weigh more
Font size and the text either side of an anchor	Prominent, in-context links carry more than hidden or boilerplate ones
First-seen, last-seen and deletion dates for anchors	Link age and link churn are tracked
Extra data for anchors from news sources	Links from news sites are handled separately
Measures of a site’s topical focus and of how far a page sits from that focus	Topical fit between the linking site and the target matters
A host age value used “to sandbox fresh spam in serving time”	New hosts can be held back when they look like spam
Only the last 20 versions of a URL are kept	Google can see what a repurposed page or expired domain used to be

The left column is documented. The right column is inference. An inference can be sensible and still be wrong.

What is inferred, and what is speculation

“Links from pages with zero clicks are ignored.” This is Mike King’s hypothesis: click data helps decide a page’s index tier, the tier sets the anchor’s quality bucket, so links from pages nobody visits count for little. It is plausible and consistent with the documents. It is not confirmed, and an Ahrefs test found only a weak relationship between the traffic of a linking page and the ranking benefit of its link.

Clicks can outvote links. It is confirmed that Navboost and links both exist and both matter. No document states how they interact. The idea that a well-linked page sinks if users do not click it is an inference.

How much links contribute to site quality. The court exhibit confirms that PageRank is an input to the quality score. Its share is unknown, and so is the way the site-level authority value is calculated.

A sandbox for all new sites. Only the spam-related host age value is documented. A general sandbox is speculation.

Disavow data. Analysts noted that disavow files do not appear in the leaked modules and guessed that the tool is separate from core ranking data. That is speculation too.

How to use this evidence

1. Treat the two-job model as settled: anchors for relevance, PageRank for trust. Both parts need attention, which is why anchor text gets its own lesson.
2. Prefer links on pages that real people visit and that sit close to trusted sites. This is consistent with the confirmed and the documented evidence, even though the exact mechanism is inferred.
3. Avoid sudden bursts of the same commercial anchor. The measurement of anchor spikes is documented, and the cost of caution is low.
4. Check the history of any expired domain before you buy it. Google keeps past versions of pages. See expired domains.
5. Do not turn a field name into a rule with a number attached. No leaked document supports a “safe” anchor ratio or link velocity threshold.

Where to go next

Read how search engines evaluate links for the wider model, then the timeline of Google’s link spam updates to see how enforcement changed over the same years. Our methodology explains how we grade evidence across the site.