Are all “relevance” updates negative for marketers?

Here's a question worth sitting with: if mailbox providers keep raising the bar on relevance, does that hurt everyone, or does it actually create an opening for senders who were already doing the right thing?

The honest answer is that relevance updates are a mixed bag depending on where you stand. They hurt senders who rely on volume, bought lists, or spray-and-pray campaigns. But for senders who actually know their audience, these updates are closer to a gift.

What "relevance updates" actually means

When Gmail or Outlook rolls out a relevance update, they're adjusting how much weight they put on engagement signals: opens, clicks, moves to inbox, replies, deletions without reading, spam reports, and unsubscribes. The algorithm gets a better picture of whether a specific subscriber actually wants your email, not just whether your domain is clean.

Who wins

• Senders with high engagement rates. If your subscribers regularly open and click, relevance updates reinforce that signal. Your placement improves because the filter has strong evidence you belong in the inbox.
• Senders who clean their lists. Removing unengaged subscribers before they start deleting without reading (or worse, hitting spam) means your engagement ratios stay healthy even after an update tightens the thresholds.
• Senders who segment well. Sending a promotions email only to people who bought last month, rather than your entire list, means the signal-to-noise ratio for that segment is excellent. Gmail rewards that.
• Senders with consistent sending patterns. Erratic volume spikes confuse filters. Steady, predictable sending with good engagement is the profile filters trust.

Who loses

• Senders still emailing people who haven't opened in 12+ months. Every deletion-without-reading is a negative vote. Enough of those and relevance filters start routing you to spam across the board, not just for those subscribers.
• Senders who grew their list fast without worrying about quality. A big list full of cold or unconfirmed addresses looks great on a dashboard and awful to a mailbox provider.
• Senders chasing clicks with misleading subject lines. A high open rate followed by no clicks, or worse, an immediate deletion, is a red flag to Gmail's relevance model. It reads as bait-and-switch.

A quick self-check

Not sure which camp you're in? Ask yourself these questions about your last 90 days of sending:

• What's your open rate trend: rising, flat, or falling?
• Do you have subscribers who haven't opened anything in 6+ months still on your active list?
• What's your spam complaint rate? (Above 0.08% is a red flag for Gmail.)
• Are you segmenting based on engagement, or sending every email to every contact?
• When did you last remove or suppress genuinely inactive addresses?

Still if those answers make you nervous, that's actually useful information. It means a relevance update isn't what's hurting you. Your current practices are. (The update just made it harder to hide.)

If you want to know how your list health looks right now, our free blocklist checker is a decent first signal. For a deeper look at what's actually in your list, we also do proper list cleaning if you want the full picture ;)