What E-E-A-T actually is
E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust. It comes from Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines — the document that human evaluators use to assess whether search results are good. Google added the first E (Experience) in December 2022, expanding the original E-A-T framework.
A common misunderstanding: E-E-A-T is not a direct ranking signal. There is no E-E-A-T score that Google inserts into PageRank. It's a framework that human raters use to evaluate results, and those evaluations train the machine learning systems that do affect ranking. The distinction matters because it means you can't "hack" E-E-A-T — you have to genuinely earn it.
Think of it this way: E-E-A-T is the framework. PageRank and Core Web Vitals and hundreds of other signals are the mechanisms. E-E-A-T describes what Google is trying to measure. The other signals are how it tries to measure it.
Experience — the newest letter
Experience is about first-hand, lived engagement with the topic. Has the person who wrote this actually used the product, been to the place, run the campaign, made the investment? This is what separates a practitioner from a synthesiser.
Google added this letter because AI and content farms had gotten good enough at faking expertise — citing sources correctly, using the right vocabulary, structuring articles properly. What they couldn't fake was the specific details that only come from doing the thing: the metric that moved unexpectedly, the tool that didn't work as advertised, the client conversation that changed the strategy.
How to signal experience in your content:
- Write in first person where you've actually done the thing. "I ran this campaign for 9 months and here's what happened" is more valuable than "campaigns like this typically produce…"
- Include specific numbers, dates, and outcomes from your own work.
- Reference failure as well as success. Only people who've done things fail at them.
- Use screenshots and artefacts from real work, not stock images or generic diagrams.
Expertise
Expertise is depth of knowledge in a subject, whether from formal credentials or practical experience. A dentist is an expert in dental health. A 20-year plumber is an expert in plumbing. Both are valid. What matters is that the expertise is demonstrable — readers and Google can see evidence of it, not just be told it exists.
Expertise signals that work:
- Author bylines with real bios — not "the team" or "admin." A named person with credentials and a link to an author page.
- An author page that lists credentials, past work, education, and the topics they cover.
- Topical depth — a site with 20 articles about one topic signals expertise more than a site with one article across 20 topics.
- Person schema on author pages and Article schema on content, linking author to content.
Authoritativeness
Authoritativeness is about your reputation in your field — what other sources say about you and your content. It lives mostly off-page: backlinks, citations, mentions, expert quotes, being included in round-ups. You can't build it on your own site alone.
On-page, the goal is to make it easy for Google to connect you to third-party validation:
- Use the
sameAsproperty in your Person schema to link to your LinkedIn, published work, and any profiles that verify you. - Link outward to sources that corroborate your standing — case study results, published research you contributed to, publications you've written for.
- Be consistent: the same name, bio, and headshot across your site, social profiles, and guest posts.
Trust — the most important one
In the 2022 update, Google moved Trust to the centre of the E-E-A-T diagram. The guidelines say the other three are "important concepts that can align with an assessment of Trust" — meaning they're evidence for trust, not substitutes for it.
Trust is the simplest bucket to understand and the most often neglected: is this site honest, accurate, safe, and accountable? Practically:
- Accuracy: are claims factual, sourced, and kept up to date?
- Transparency: is there a real About page, a real Contact page, and a clear picture of who runs the site?
- Safety: HTTPS, no malware, a real privacy policy.
- Reputation: third-party reviews, mentions, absence of unresolved complaints.
A page with strong expertise and experience will still perform poorly if trust signals are missing or contradicted — especially in finance, health, and legal topics (see YMYL).
8 things you can do this week
- Add a named author byline with a real bio to every article on your site.
- Create a proper author page — photo, credentials, published work, LinkedIn link.
- Add Article schema to every article, linking author to the Person schema @id.
- Add published and last-modified dates to every article (visible to readers, not just in schema).
- Write one piece of content this week that includes a specific result or experience only you could have.
- Audit your About page — does it name the person running the site and explain their credentials?
- Add sameAs links to your LinkedIn and any published work in your Person schema.
- Check that your privacy policy and contact page are real (not templated boilerplate).