Google’s John Mueller in an interview with Marie Haynes said that it would be “really rare” that disavowing links would result in your web site doing better in search algorithmically. Sure, if you have a manual action, maybe but not without a manual action.

Marie Haynes posted the podcast on her site and transcribed it:

Glenn Gabe summed this up to with his classic GIF tweets:

In 2019, John did say that disavowing links may help with trust, maybe help Google’s algorithms trust your other links more. But Google also said that it’s algorithms do not look at disavow files.

Forum discussion at Twitter.