The SEO literacy test I put up at seotest.ing started with a poll on X on October 25 that asked, according to Google, true or false: E-E-A-T is a ranking factor. Google’s SEO Starter Guide settles it in four words: “No, it’s not.” The poll still split. That made me want something bigger than one myth, a test a working SEO should be able to pass, where every answer rests on a page Google published and nothing rests on me.
It went live that afternoon, about 5 PM Mountain time. A day later, 202 people had finished it.
How the SEO literacy test grades answers
How the SEO literacy test grades answers is the one rule I didn’t bend: the right answer is always a sentence Google wrote. After each pick, the page shows Google’s quote, links the page it came from, and shows a screenshot of that page with the words highlighted. Every quote was checked word for word against copies of the pages I saved on October 25, and a script checks each one against those copies before a release.
- Pool
- 90 questions in play, 9 in each of 10 areas
- Round
- 30 drawn at random, 3 from every area, all shuffled
- Pass mark
- 24 of 30
- Areas
- How Search works, crawling, indexing, status codes, on-page, content and E-E-A-T, links, spam, experience and local, AI search
- Answers
- Google’s quoted words, linked, with a screenshot of the page
- Tally
- first try per IP address, so retakes don’t lift the numbers
It looks like a Google page on purpose, since that’s where the answers live, but it has its own name and mark, no Google logo, no sign-in, and “Not affiliated with Google” at the top and bottom of every screen.
What changed in the SEO literacy test after the first night
What changed in the SEO literacy test after the first night came from a critique I was sent a few hours after launch, and most of it was right. Some false statements gave themselves away with words like “always” and “never”, so you could pass them on grammar alone. A random draw could also hand one person a much harder round than the next. And my line “Nothing here is an opinion” claimed too much, because choosing which Google passage counts is an editorial call even when the words are Google’s.
So by 9:45 PM that night I had retired 10 giveaway questions and put in 10 applied ones, where you read a robots.txt file, a redirect chain or a raw server response and say what Google does with it. 16 of the 90 questions in play now show code or a short scenario. Each round now draws one easier, one middle and one harder question from every area, sorted by how often people got each right on their first try. The copy now says the answers are graded against the cited page, not that they’re beyond argument.
SEO literacy test results from the first 202 people
SEO literacy test results from the first 202 people came in lower than I expected. On their first try, people averaged 22.9 of 30, and 50 percent reached the pass mark of 24. The first 16, who took the older fixed round before the giveaways were retired, averaged 25.1 with 75 percent passing, so the harder questions did their job.
The questions people miss most are the ones I’d most want a new hire to know.
| Question | First tries | Got it right |
|---|---|---|
| An instant meta refresh redirect: how does Google treat it? | 40 | 20% |
| A 410 (gone) compared with a 404 (not found) | 71 | 34% |
| What keywords in a domain name do for ranking | 35 | 37% |
| A noindex rule in robots.txt keeps pages out of Google | 69 | 38% |
| What Google does with changefreq and priority in a sitemap | 40 | 38% |
| A URL that goes through 11 redirects | 54 | 43% |
Only 1 in 5 knew how Google reads an instant meta refresh.
Why people miss the SEO literacy test’s hardest questions
Why people miss the SEO literacy test’s hardest questions is my read, not something the tally proves: most of them are places where an old habit says one thing and Google’s current page says another. Google’s redirects page says it “interprets instant meta refresh redirects as permanent redirects”, and four in five takers missed it. On status codes, Google says “All 4xx errors, except 429, are treated the same”, so a 410 doesn’t buy a faster removal or a ranking bump, and about two in three takers missed it.
The robots.txt one stings because it’s a real way to lose control of pages. Google’s noindex documentation says plainly that a noindex rule in robots.txt “is not supported by Google”. Fewer than 4 in 10 got that on their first try. The redirect chain question is the same kind of gap: Google’s status code page says its crawlers follow up to 10 redirect hops by default, and 11 is one too many.
None of these are trick questions. Each one shows the code and links the page with the answer on it.
The SEO literacy test in Google’s AI Mode a day later
The SEO literacy test was already in Google’s AI Mode the day after launch. When I searched “SEO literacy test” there on October 26, the answer opened with the test by name, linked seotest.ing, described it as a 30-question quiz on crawling, indexing, links, E-E-A-T and AI search based on Google’s documentation, and gave the 30 from 90 draw and the 24 of 30 pass mark. The site was the first source in the panel beside it, ahead of a thread in r/SEO about the test and a hiring-test vendor’s page.
My read is that a page with one clear subject, a name that matches the search, and plain numbers in its first lines is easy for an AI answer to lift, especially when few pages compete for the phrase. It’s one search on one day, so I’m treating it as a good sign, not a result.
The test is free. If you take it, the running tally shows where you land against everyone else’s first try, and if you think a passage I picked is the wrong one, that’s the argument I want to hear.
Sources
- Basic SEO Literacy Test
- SEO Literacy Test Results: The Running Tally
- SEO Starter Guide: The Basics (Google Search Central)
- Redirects and Google Search (Google Search Central)
- How HTTP status codes affect Google’s crawlers (Google)
- Block Search indexing with noindex (Google Search Central)