Over the United States holidays some posts were shared about an alleged leak of Google ranking-related data. The first posts about the leaks focused on “confirming” beliefs that were long-held by Rand Fishkin but not much attention was focused on the context of the information and what it really means.
Context Matters: Document AI Warehouse
The leaked document shares relation to a public Google Cloud platform called Document AI Warehouse which is used for analyzing, organizing, searching, and storing data. This public documentation is titled Document AI Warehouse overview. A post on Facebook shares that the “leaked” data is the “internal version” of the publicly visible Document AI Warehouse documentation. That’s the context of this data.
Screenshot: Document AI Warehouse
@DavidGQuaid tweeted:
“I think its clear its an external facing API for building a document warehouse as the name suggests”
That seems to throw cold water on the idea that the “leaked” data represents internal Google Search information.
As far we know at this time, the “leaked data” shares a similarity to what’s in the public Document AI Warehouse page.
Leak Of Internal Search Data?
The original post on SparkToro does not say that the data originates from Google Search. It says that the person who sent Rand Fishkin the data is the one who made that claim. One of the things I admire about Rand Fishkin is that he is meticulously precise about what he writes, especially when it comes to caveats. Rand precisely notes that it’s the person who provided the data who claims that the data originates from Google Search. There is no proof, only a claim.
He writes: