Your Answer-clarity score changed this week, and here is the exact reason: we shipped a rebuilt scorer on 18 July 2026. The rubric now treats all ten of our supported languages equally, drops boilerplate legal pages from your average, and measures freshness from your content's own dates. Most domains moved several points, non-English sites the furthest.
Why did my score change?
Six changes to the rubric, not to your content:
- Blog index pages no longer count. A list of teasers can never score like an answer page, so the bare /blog index is out of the average. Your individual posts still count, each on its own score.
- Legal pages no longer count. Privacy policies, imprints, and terms pages score low by nature and said nothing about your answers. They are excluded from the domain average.
- Non-English content scores fairly. The scorer now recognizes guillemets («»), German low-9 quotes („"), and curly quotes as quotations; attribution verbs in German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, and Arabic; and question headings in Cyrillic, accented, and Arabic scripts, including the Arabic question mark (؟). Before, only straight quotes and English verbs counted, which held non-English pages several points under their real level.
- Readability is measured on prose only. Headings, lists, and code no longer drag the Flesch reading-ease check down.
- Freshness follows your sitemap. The age of a page now comes from its sitemap lastmod date instead of our last crawl. Pages untouched for more than 90 days start losing freshness points, and updating the content (with the lastmod to match) wins them back. Google applies the same standard: "Google uses the
<lastmod>value if it's consistently and verifiably (for example by comparing to the last modification of the page) accurate," notes Google Search Central. - One consistent average. The dashboard and the rescore job now grade the same set of URLs, which ends the flip-flopping some domains saw between two values.
Do I need to do anything?
No. Every domain was rescored automatically. If your score dropped, the freshness change is the usual cause: check which pages carry a lastmod older than 90 days and refresh them first.
How do we grade the score itself?
The score is our rubric for citation-ready writing, informed by published guidance from Google Search Central and generative-engine optimization research. It predicts how quotable your pages are; it does not measure citations after the fact. That measurement ships separately as AI visibility tracking.