Google Top Heavy update
The Top Heavy update was a 2012 Google change that ranked pages lower when ads filled the top of the page and pushed the content out of sight.
The Google Top Heavy update was a change Google made in January 2012 to rank pages lower when ads take up most of the top of the page. Google called it the page layout algorithm. "Top Heavy" is the name SEO writers gave it.
The reason was simple. People complained that when they clicked a result, they had to scroll past a wall of ads to find what they came for. Google said normal amounts of ads at the top were fine, and the change was aimed at pages that went much further.
Where the idea lives now
The update itself is old, but the idea is part of how Google thinks about page experience today. Google asks whether your pages avoid excessive ads and intrusive interstitials, and whether a visitor can easily tell the main content apart from everything else on the page.
What it means for your pages
The first screen of a page should show what the page is about. For example, a recipe page on a coffee blog that opens with a full-width banner ad, a newsletter sign-up and two more ads, before the first line of the recipe, is exactly the kind of page this change was aimed at. Move the content up and the ads down.
Ads and AI answers
AI platforms read the text of a page, so a banner ad doesn't hide your words from them the way it hides them from a person. But they also look for an answer to quote, and pages that put a clear answer near the top are easier to use. The same layout that makes a page pleasant for a person, content first and clutter later, tends to make it easier for a machine.
In AnswerOrbit
Two of the eight Page checks in Recommendations look at the top of your page: An opening that answers and Fast on phones. Run them on a page and a prompt to see how it compares with the pages the platforms cite. See Recommendations.