Fundamentals

E-E-A-T

Also called: experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trust

E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust: the framework Google's quality raters use to judge content, and a useful proxy for what its systems reward.

E-E-A-T is not a ranking factor with a score attached; it is the vocabulary in the quality rater guidelines used to train and evaluate the systems that do rank. That distinction matters because it means you cannot optimise a number — you can only make the signals a rater would look for verifiable: who wrote this, what have they actually done, why should anyone believe the claim.

It weighs heaviest on subjects where bad information causes harm — health, finance, legal, safety — where an anonymous, undated page competing against institutions has essentially no route to the first page. On ordinary commercial topics it is looser, but the same fundamentals apply: named authors, real credentials, sourced claims, honest dates and a company that is identifiable behind the site.

In practice

  • Give every article a named author with a real, checkable biography
  • Source factual claims to primary documents, not to other blogs
  • Publish who the company is, where it is, and how to reach a human

Related terms

Guides on this subject