What is E-E-A-T?
Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness: the qualities Google's quality raters look for and its systems are trained to reward. Real authors, real credentials, real contact details and content that shows first-hand experience.
E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. It comes from the guidelines Google gives the people it pays to rate the quality of search results. The first E, experience, was added in December 2022, to recognise that someone who has actually done a thing often knows it better than someone who has only read about it.
It is not a score, and there is no E-E-A-T setting to turn up. The raters’ judgements are used to check whether Google’s systems are rewarding the right pages, so E-E-A-T describes what those systems are trying to find rather than a box to tick.
In practice it rewards the obvious things. Real people named as authors, with a real reason to know the subject. A business that can be contacted and checked. Content that shows first-hand knowledge rather than repeating what every other page says. It matters most on subjects where bad advice can cost someone money or health, which Google calls “your money or your life”.
The industry has turned it into a checklist of author boxes and credentials. The simpler version is to be a real business that knows what it is talking about, and to let that show.
Search that compounds, run by people who show their work.
Strategy, technical, content, links and local, planned together and reported against the numbers your business cares about.