E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) is the framework Google's quality raters use to evaluate page quality. It's documented in Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines and updated periodically — most notably the addition of the second "E" (Experience) in December 2022.
What each letter means
- Experience: did the author actually do the thing they're writing about? First-hand experience matters especially for product reviews, restaurant write-ups, medical advice, and travel.
- Expertise: does the author have the relevant knowledge, qualifications, or track record?
- Authoritativeness: is the page (and the site) considered a go-to source on this topic by others? Citations, backlinks, brand recognition.
- Trustworthiness: is the page accurate, transparent about its sources, free of misleading claims, and supported by a verifiable publisher?
What this means in practice
E-E-A-T is not a direct ranking signal. Google's algorithm doesn't have an "E-E-A-T score." But the quality raters' evaluations train the systems that do affect rankings, especially via the Helpful Content updates that have rolled through every six months since 2022.
Pages that quality raters rate as low E-E-A-T tend to be the pages that subsequently lose rankings.
How to signal E-E-A-T on a page
Concrete moves that raters check for:
- Bylines with bios: real author name, photo, link to a bio page. Not "Admin" or "The Team."
- About page: who runs the site, contact info, business address if relevant.
- Sources cited inline: link to studies, official docs, primary sources when making factual claims.
- Dates: when was this page published and last updated?
- Author schema:
PersonJSON-LD on bylines with role, employer, social profiles. - First-hand evidence on review/experience content: photos you took, screenshots from your account, data you measured.
YMYL pages need this most
Google holds Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) topics — health, finance, legal, parenting — to a much higher E-E-A-T standard. A site without credentialed authors writing medical content will struggle. A small site with strong technical SEO can still rank for low-YMYL topics with weaker E-E-A-T signals.
In the AI Overview era
E-E-A-T signals correlate with citation rates in AI Overview and Perplexity. Models preferentially cite "known publisher" sites for the same authoritativeness reasons. Building real-world signals (citations, partnerships, named-author bylines) pays off in both classic SEO and generative search.