SEO glossary

NavBoost

NavBoost is a Google ranking system that uses click data from past searches to adjust which results rank for a query. Pandu Nayak, a Google vice president of search, described it in the US antitrust trial against Google as one of the important signals Google has, drawing on 13 months of data.

Reviewed by Gareth Hoyle, Managing Director
Last reviewed 31 October 2026

How did NavBoost become public?

NavBoost came to light through United States v. Google, the search antitrust case brought by the US Department of Justice. Nayak testified at the trial in October 2023. Notes of a later call with him, dated 31 January 2025 and published by the Department of Justice, describe NavBoost as a lookup table from queries to documents that measures how often users, split by location and device type, click on a document for a given query.

What does NavBoost do?

According to Search Engine Land's account of Nayak's testimony, NavBoost memorises clicks on queries from the past 13 months, down from 18 months before 2017. Nayak said it culls a large set of documents down to a smaller one, and that it can't help rank documents that have no clicks. He described a related system, Glue, as another name for NavBoost that covers all the other features on the results page.

What it means for SEO

Click data records what searchers do after they see a result: whether they choose it, and whether they come back to pick something else. That makes titles, snippets and how quickly a page answers the query part of ranking, not only of conversion. New pages with no click history have to rank on other signals until they earn clicks.

Write titles and descriptions that match the intent of the query
Answer the query near the top of the page
Track click-through rate by query in Search Console

Example

Two pages rank fifth and sixth for 'how to bleed a radiator'. Searchers who click the fifth find five numbered steps at the top. Those who click the sixth meet a long introduction and go back to the results to choose another page. Over months, that pattern of clicks is the kind of evidence NavBoost records.