E-E-A-T

For a long stretch, everything a search engine ranked on was something a machine could count. How often the target phrase appeared in the text, how many backlinks other sites had pointed at the page. A backlink is a link someone else placed to your address, and the engine read each one like a vote.

Countable criteria are easy to aim at. Pages that repeated one sentence twenty times with slight variations, and sites that bought hundreds of links, genuinely occupied the first screen of results. The trouble was that nobody reading those pages got an answer. Someone searching for what to take for joint pain read a first-place article invented by a person who was neither a doctor nor a pharmacist, written to move links.

The wall the engine ran into was judgment. Whether writing is trustworthy is not a property you can count words to find. So Google stood up a separate apparatus of people who read pages and score them, and published a document describing what those people should look at. The four letters in that document are E-E-A-T. It started as three — expertise, authoritativeness, trust — and first-hand experience was added to the front in December 2022.

Each of the four asks a different question. Read in order, they widen out from the individual author to the whole site.

1. Experience — has this person actually done it? For a vacuum review, are there photos they took while using it; for a piece on founding a company, has the writer run one? This is the line between a piece researched and a piece lived through.
2. Expertise — do they know enough to handle the subject properly? A credential isn't the same thing as expertise. Tax pieces written by tax accountants, parenting pieces by people who raised children — knowledge matched to the topic is what counts.
3. Authoritativeness — does the field come looking for this person or site? A trade publication citing them, another expert linking to them, are signals of recognition from outside. It's the one item nobody can manufacture by asserting it. A team can write its own bio page in an afternoon; being cited by the trade press takes a year of showing up.
4. Trust — the center the other three point at. Whether the site says who runs it, whether there's a way to make contact, whether refund terms are hidden — things outside the writing itself get weighed here.

The scoring is done by people, not an algorithm. Google shows search results to contractors it calls search quality raters and has them score against this yardstick. Those scores don't flow into the ranking of the page that was scored.

They work as a report card on the algorithm instead. Google changes how ranking is calculated, has raters score the new results, and checks whether they came out better than before. E-E-A-T is less an input to ranking than the target the ranking algorithm is trying to hit.

The yardstick doesn't apply with equal force to every query. It tightens most on topics where wrong information does real damage — money and health. Investing, lending, medicine, and law are the clear cases; searches for dinner ideas or a movie plot are far looser.

In practice it shows up as a handful of extra items on the on-page SEO checklist that sit outside the writing. On-page SEO means tuning a page's title and internal structure for search; these four get added to it.

1. Name the author. Give the name and a line or two on why this person is the one writing about this. A piece bylined to a company and the same piece bylined to a tax accountant with eight years in the field read differently.
2. Source the numbers and claims. Saying where a figure came from lets the reader check it, and leaving it open to checking is itself the evidence of trust.
3. Give people a way to verify the company. An about page, an address, contact details, and refund terms in places that are easy to find.
4. Put what you did yourself into the writing. Scenes your team lived through and screenshots taken at the time fill the experience item; a summary of someone else's article doesn't.

It looks like an overlap with content quality, but the two face different ways. Content quality asks whether the answer the searcher wanted is in the piece. E-E-A-T asks who is giving that answer. Rankings move when both hold, and a page strong on one and empty on the other tends to sit just off the first screen.

"This topic gets hit hard on E-E-A-T, so I don't think we can publish it under a freelancer's byline."

Money or health is at stake, so the author's standing affects where the page lands.

"The content is good, but there's no author bio, so the E-E-A-T side is empty."

A request to strengthen the attribution rather than the writing.

"E-E-A-T isn't a score, it's rater guidance. There's no number to move."

Heading off an attempt to manage it as a metric.

At Pagedeck the phrase comes up most often in the review right before a blog post ships. When Ravi writes about security settings in a collaborative document tool and bylines it to the company, someone suggests putting Theo's name on it along with a line reading "six years in infrastructure, wired up these settings himself." Not a word of the content changes, but the weight it carries in search results does.

The same holds when Sofia brings the post to a security review: the first thing the customer looks at is who wrote it. An item filled in for search rankings gets used as-is in a sales conversation.

The most common misreading treats E-E-A-T as a score you can raise. It's packaged neatly into four letters and tied to rankings, which makes it seem like a number must exist somewhere. Google has said repeatedly that it assigns no such score, and the value appears nowhere in Search Console. Believe the number exists and someone sets a goal like "raise E-E-A-T 20 percent this quarter," and since no action can be tied to a movement, a few months later nobody looks at that goal.

Assuming an author profile box covers it is the other common one. It's easy to turn into a checklist item, so it gets done first. But three of the four items accumulate outside the site and no profile box produces them. A name and a job title sitting above a summary of someone else's article reads to a rater as experience being dressed up, which costs more than it gains.