What E-E-A-T stands for
Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust — the framework from Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines, the manual given to the thousands of human raters who evaluate search results:
- Experience — has the author actually done the thing? Used the product, visited the place, lived the situation. Added as the second E in December 2022, aimed squarely at content written from nowhere by no one.
- Expertise — does the author know the field? Formal credentials where they matter (medical, legal, financial), demonstrated skill where they don't.
- Authoritativeness — is the author or site a recognized source on this topic, the kind others cite and link to?
- Trust — the umbrella over the other three, and per the guidelines the most important: is the page honest, accurate, safe, and clear about who is behind it?
Not a ranking factor — the target of ranking factors
There is no E-E-A-T score inside Google's algorithm; raters' judgments don't directly move individual rankings. Instead the ratings define what Google's engineers tune the real signals to reward. E-E-A-T is the specification; the algorithm is the attempt to measure it at scale. That's why it can't be gamed directly — and why demonstrating it still moves rankings.
The bar scales with stakes. For "your money or your life" topics — health, finance, safety, law — the guidelines demand far more evidence of expertise and trust than for a hobby blog.
Demonstrating it on a page
E-E-A-T only counts when it's visible — to a rater, a visitor, or a crawler:
- A real byline, with a bio that says why this person knows the topic.
- First-hand evidence in the content: original photos, numbers from your own testing, specifics no outsider would know.
- Sources cited for claims that need them.
- "Reviewed by" credits from qualified reviewers on high-stakes topics.
- A site that shows its face: about page, contact page, policies.
- Structured data (
Person,Organization) making authorship machine-readable.
The pattern behind all six: an accountable human, showing their work. That's the thing Google is trying to measure — and the thing anonymous, generated, secondhand content can't fake convincingly.