E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust. It is a framework from Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines, used by human raters to assess whether results are good, which in turn informs how Google's systems are built. It is not a score attached to your site and there is no setting for it. You demonstrate it by making it obvious that a real, qualified person stands behind the page and can be checked.
What each letter covers
| Element | The question it asks | How it becomes visible |
|---|---|---|
| Experience | Has the author done this thing themselves | Firsthand detail, original photographs, specifics only a practitioner would know |
| Expertise | Do they have the knowledge to be right | Credentials, qualifications, a body of work on the subject |
| Authoritativeness | Are they recognized by others as a source | Citations, coverage, being referenced elsewhere |
| Trust | Can this site and page be relied on | Accuracy, transparency, contactability, a secure and honest site |
Trust sits at the center of the four. Google's own guidance treats the other three as ways of establishing it, which is a useful way to prioritize.
Experience is the one people skip
The first E was added later than the rest, and it is the easiest to demonstrate and the most commonly ignored. It asks whether the person writing has done the thing.
A review of a product written by someone who used it reads differently from one assembled out of specifications. So does a guide to a process written by someone who has run it forty times. The tells are specific: what went wrong, what surprised them, what they would do differently.
This is also the hardest quality for generated text to fake, which makes it more valuable now than it was a few years ago.
What to put on the page
- A named author, with a link to a bio that establishes why this person is worth reading on this subject.
- Their relevant credentials, stated plainly. Years in the field, qualifications, the work they have done.
- A published date and a meaningful updated date. Updating the date without updating the content is a trust problem rather than a trust signal.
- Sources for claims that need them, linked directly to the source rather than to somebody else summarizing it.
- Firsthand detail that could only come from doing the work.
- A clear way to contact a real organization. A physical presence, a phone number, a named team.
What to put on the site
- Author pages that are real pages, with a bio, a photograph, credentials and links to their work elsewhere.
- An About page that says who owns the business and who works there.
- Person and Organization structured data, so the connections are machine-readable as well as human-readable.
- Editorial standards published openly, if you publish anything where accuracy carries weight.
Where it matters most
Google applies a much higher standard to topics it classes as consequential: health, finance, legal matters, safety, and anything else where bad information causes real harm. A recipe blog and a page about medication interactions are not held to the same bar, and they should not be.
If you publish in one of those areas, author credentials stop being a nice addition and become the price of entry.
E-E-A-T describes what a careful reader would look for before believing you. There is no lever attached to it. Every practical step on this page is just making that check easy to run.