Mike Kilinski attended the annual Think Auto Google event in Toronto, Canada last week at that event, the head of Google Brain in Canada said that Google now uses click data for rankings. He said Google looks to train their AI models when “someone clicks on a page and stays on that page, when they go back” and so on.

It was not 100% clear if he was talking about just training the models or if it directly impacts the live search results. It might just be used for building new models later based on the feedback they get back from these models. Google has time and time again said that they do not use click data for ranking purposes because it is too easy to spam and too noisy.

But here we have someone at Google supposedly saying they do. Here is the audio recording Mike grabbed:

Here is the transcript:

I did email Google last Thursday to get clarification but I have not yet heard back.

Forum discussion at Twitter.