Yes, HTTPS is still a Google ranking factor, but it is a confirmed signal with an unquantified, probably small effect, not a lever you can pull for a visible jump in position. Google said so itself back in 2014, and nothing published since has walked that back or scaled it up. If you came here hoping an HTTPS Google ranking boost is something you can still chase for a meaningful win, the honest answer is: the easy part already happened for almost everyone on the web, and what is left to gain from it now is mostly security, not rankings.
Here is how the evidence actually grades out. Confirmed: Google uses HTTPS as a signal, and has said so directly. Limited: nobody, including Google, has published a current number for how much it moves a page. That gap between "real" and "measured" is where most of the confusion about the HTTPS ranking factor lives, so it is worth walking through carefully.
What Google Actually Confirmed, and When
On August 7, 2014, Google's Search Central blog announced that secure, encrypted connections had become a signal in its ranking algorithms. The post said Google's own testing had produced positive results, and that it was starting to use HTTPS as a signal, with more weight planned over time if things went well.
The qualifying language in that post is the part people tend to drop when they repeat the story. Google called it, in its own words, "a very lightweight signal," one that affected fewer than 1% of global queries at the time and carried less weight than things like high-quality content. That 1% figure describes how much of the index the signal touched when it launched, not how many ranking positions a site could expect to gain. Those are two different claims, and conflating them is the single most common mistake in HTTPS ranking factor discussions. You will still see people paraphrase it as "HTTPS gives less than a 1% boost," and that is not what Google said.
A few days later, on August 13, 2014, Search Engine Land reported comments from Google's John Mueller clarifying that the signal worked on a per URL basis. An HTTPS version of a page could carry the signal while an HTTP version of the same site did not. Mueller also described the effect as small, not a guaranteed jump to a specific spot on the results page.
Later reporting kept the same tone rather than upgrading it. A May 2023 Search Engine Journal piece quoted Google wording describing some ranking factors, HTTPS among them, as "extremely lightweight." The article's retrieved text does not name who said it at Google, so treat it as later secondary reporting that reinforces the original 2014 framing, not as a fresh, numbered announcement. Nine years apart, the description did not change: lightweight then, lightweight now, no published number either time.
Why Site Owners Still Argue About This
If Google confirmed it, why does the question keep coming back? Because the evidence on the ground has never lined up neatly with the announcement, and that gap is real, not imagined.
Shortly after the 2014 launch, SearchMetrics ran its own analysis of ranking data and, according to a September 2014 Search Engine Land report, its executive Marcus Tober said the company could not discern a relationship between HTTPS and rankings once outliers were removed. The report did not say how large the sample was, and it noted the result could mean either that Google had not fully rolled the signal out yet or that the effect was too small to detect in the slice of the index SearchMetrics studied.
That is not a case against Google's statement. It is an early observational study running into the limits of what observation can show. A signal can exist and still be too small, or too early, for an outside dataset to pick up cleanly. The right way to hold both facts at once: Google's own confirmation establishes that the mechanic is real, and SearchMetrics' early result shows that detecting it from the outside, with the tools available in 2014, did not work. Neither one cancels the other.
There is also a historical wrinkle worth knowing if you read older SEO advice: a September 2015 Search Engine Land report quoted Google's Gary Illyes describing HTTPS as something that could break a tie between two results that were otherwise equally strong on quality. That framing stuck, and you will still see people repeat "HTTPS is just a tiebreaker" as though it were a documented, permanent rule. It is a dated comment about how the signal behaved in one conversation nearly a decade ago, not a current technical specification Google has reconfirmed since.
What the Adoption Data Actually Shows, and What It Cannot Show
A separate strand of evidence tracks how common HTTPS became among top ranking pages over time, and it gets cited constantly, usually for the wrong conclusion.
Moz's Dr. Peter Meyers reported in April 2017 that HTTPS had crossed 50% of page one Google results in Moz's own 10,000 keyword tracking set, up from 30% roughly nine months earlier. By October 2020, a follow up Moz article put that figure at 98% of page one organic results in the same tracking set, with a separate STAT dataset of 7.5 million keywords showing a similar pattern, including more than 92% HTTPS even toward the tail end of the top 50 results.
Read those numbers as a story about adoption, not causation. They show that HTTPS became close to universal among pages that already ranked well, for reasons that include the wider web's move to HTTPS generally, browser warnings pushing sites to switch, and certificate costs dropping to free. They do not isolate HTTPS as the reason any specific page outranked another, and they cannot, because by the time 98% of page one is already HTTPS, there is barely any HTTP comparison group left to measure against. The 2020 Moz piece drew the right conclusion from its own data: HTTPS had become table stakes, something everyone has, not something that separates the pages at the top from the pages just below them.
What "Does SSL Affect SEO" Gets Wrong
A lot of the confusion starts with vocabulary. HTTPS is HTTP traffic secured with TLS, Transport Layer Security. According to MDN's documentation on the protocol, TLS provides three things: it encrypts data in transit, it protects against undetected tampering with that data, and it lets the two sides verify who they are actually talking to. That is a security and transport mechanism. It says nothing about whether the content on the page is accurate, well written, or worth ranking.
People often ask "does SSL affect SEO" using SSL as shorthand for the certificate itself, since SSL was the predecessor protocol to TLS and the term stuck around in common usage. The distinction matters here: Google's ranking signal is about secure HTTPS connections and URLs, not about which certificate you bought, which issuer signed it, or how much you paid for it. There is no evidence in Google's own guidance, or anywhere else reviewed for this piece, that a pricier certificate or a specific certificate brand earns a ranking advantage over a free one. A valid certificate on a properly served HTTPS URL is what the signal is checking for, nothing more granular than that.
Google Search Console's HTTPS report exists to help you diagnose problems, not to show you a ranking gain. It flags things like an invalid certificate, an HTTPS page that redirects back to HTTP, or an HTTPS URL that robots.txt is blocking. Those are technical defects worth fixing because they can cause real crawling and indexing problems, not because fixing them unlocks a documented ranking jump.
If You Are Still on HTTP, Here Is What Actually Changes
If your site is still serving HTTP, the decision to move should be framed around security and user protection first, not around chasing a rankings number that nobody, including Google, has published. Browsers have trained users to notice and distrust unencrypted connections, and that alone is reason enough on most sites.
What is also true, and worth planning for honestly: moving from HTTP to HTTPS changes every URL on your site, which makes it a site move in Google's eyes, not a quiet backend upgrade. Google's current Site Moves and Migrations guidance says rankings can fluctuate while it recrawls and reindexes the new URLs, and that a medium sized site can take a few weeks or more before the new URLs fully replace the old ones in search results, with larger sites sometimes taking longer than that.
Google's own recommendations for doing this cleanly: map every old URL to its new HTTPS equivalent, use server side permanent redirects rather than client side ones, update your internal links to point at the new URLs directly instead of through a redirect, and add self referencing canonical tags on the new pages. Google's guidance also states that permanent redirects do not cause a loss of PageRank, and recommends keeping those redirects in place for at least a year. Expect heavier crawling during the move itself, since Google tends to recrawl more aggressively right after a URL change, so server capacity is worth checking beforehand. None of this promises a ranking increase. It is how you avoid losing ground during a move that, on its own, was never designed to gain you any.
Why HTTPS Gets Lumped in With Bigger Updates
Part of why this question keeps resurfacing is that HTTPS later got folded into a larger, more visible initiative: Google's Page Experience update, which bundled HTTPS alongside things like Core Web Vitals and mobile friendliness into one combined signal set. That bundling is a separate piece of history worth its own explainer, and it is easy to see why people assume HTTPS's weight grew once it joined a named update with its own announcement cycle. The evidence reviewed here does not show that happening. Being included in a named bundle is not the same as being reweighted, and nothing in Google's own material ties a specific numeric increase to HTTPS from that move. Keep the two questions separate: what HTTPS does on its own, and what the broader Page Experience signal set did as a group.
What Would Actually Change This Verdict
The verdict here holds because nothing currently published changes it, and it is worth being specific about what would. A fresh, attributed statement from Google describing the current weight or query coverage of the HTTPS signal would update this. A well designed controlled study that isolates HTTPS from every other variable on a set of matched pages, something stronger than the correlation snapshots reviewed here, would also update it. Until one of those shows up, the fair summary stays the same: real signal, unknown current size, rarely the thing deciding a close ranking call. An HTTPS Google ranking boost is not something the evidence supports chasing as a standalone project.
For a team trying to decide where to spend the next hour of SEO work, that framing matters more than the HTTPS question itself. A site that is already secure gets nothing measurable from re certifying or switching providers. A site that is not secure yet should move for its users, plan the migration like Google's guidance describes, and then put its real effort into the content quality, relevance, and structure signals that the evidence consistently shows carry far more weight. Teams running a high volume content operation, the kind DeepSmith's writing pipeline and internal linking tooling are built for, tend to get more from that reallocation than from debating a decade old security signal.
