Google to cut thousands of search quality rater jobs after dropping contract with Appen

Appen, an Australian data services company that Google contracted with for a large number of its third-party search quality raters, was notified by Google that its contract is ending on March 19. Appen said it had no prior notice and the cancellation would result in a loss of $82.8 million of revenue at a gross margin of 26% for the company.

What search quality raters do. Google’s quality raters assess the quality of the Google search results. They do not directly influence the search results, and quality raters cannot downgrade or upgrade a specific site in Google Search.

Search quality rater guidelines “are used by our search raters to help evaluate the performance of our various search ranking systems, and their ratings don’t directly influence ranking,” according to Google. “The guidelines share important considerations for what content is helpful for people when using Google Search. Our page on how to create helpful, people-first content summarizes these concepts for creators to help them self-assess their own content to be successful in Google Search,” the company added.

What it means. Appen is one of a few sources that Google uses to contract quality raters. It seems, based on the almost $83 million revenue, that Google contracted Appen for a couple of thousand raters. Google has written it has about 16,000 search quality raters, so those employed by Appen represent a significant portion of the total quality raters contracted.

• Is Google going to cancel its contracts with its other partners that provide search quality raters? We are not sure.
• Is Google going to replace these quality raters with other human quality raters from those other partners? We are not sure.
• Is Google going to replace all the quality raters eventually with AI instead? That is what many are speculating. We, again, do not know.

Dawn Anderson, one of our brightest contributors here, speculated these changes would happen months ago. And now, with many from the Google Ads team being laid off and replaced with AI, Google following a similar playbook for assessing quality makes sense.

Why we care. Human search quality raters have been a part of Google’s process for improving search quality for well over a decade. Is this move a big pivot from using humans for this process to using AI for this process? It is hard to know.

Will this result in poorer search quality in the future? Only time will tell.

Postscript. A Google spokesperson told us that the quality rater work contracted with Appen will be moved to other suppliers and away from Appen.

• “Our decision to end the contract was made as part of our ongoing effort to evaluate and adjust many of our supplier partnerships across Alphabet to ensure our vendor operations are as efficient as possible,” a Google spokesperson told Search Engine Land.

Google told us they have been working on these restructuring efforts with vendors for over a year now. Google told us canceling this contract with Appen will not impact its products or services. Google confirmed that it works with several other suppliers to provide quality rating and external feedback on the experience of its products.

Raters protest last year. Last February, a group of raters protested at Google’s Mountain View headquarters, demanding better pay, sick leave and access to health care.

• “We support billions of dollars of revenue. And we get paid less than your average fast food worker,” Google rater Ed Stackhouse told NPR.

Now, less than a year later, that contract has been terminated. However, Appen (not Google) managed pay and benefits for Google’s quality raters, Google said.

Hat tip to Cyrus Shepard for spotting this: