Specific answers buried in unheaded blocks of long pages (passage ranking)

Google confirms passage ranking identifies individual sections to judge relevance. A passage with no clear boundary or direct statement is harder to recognise as the answer. The check is a proxy; Google says no special work is needed and passage scores are not visible.

Give each distinct answer a heading that names the question and open the section with a sentence that answers it directly. Do not split the page or add length.

1. From a crawl, list pages with more than 1,500 words of main content.
2. For each, count words between consecutive H2 or H3 headings and flag any run over 400 words.
3. In Search Console, list question style queries for these pages with an average position between 8 and 30.
4. Find where each answer sits on the page and flag answers inside flagged runs with no heading naming the question.

Written for the Passage ranking page (evidence: Confirmed). Google has not documented this system in a way a site can test directly, so this check measures a proxy for it, not the system itself.

Indirect. Estimate only: can improve positions for specific long tail queries on long pages; little or no effect on short, single topic pages.

Google's ranking systems guide and Search On 2020 post describe passage ranking; the heading test is Laurelin's inference.