Google gave digital marketers something of an early Christmas present, releasing the first documented guidelines on how it will be assessing and ranking the quality of answers for voice search queries.

The guidelines, which will be followed by Google’s “search quality raters” highlight how Google will be assessing the suitability of an answer for a voice query, and how they will be judging factors such as information relevance, quality, length, grammar and elocution.

Whilst the guidelines are relatively basic for now, they represent the first official statement from Google as to what it is looking for from publishers and brands as it develops its library of voice search answers.