E-E-A-T: What It Is and How to Improve It

Have you ever wondered why Google seems to trust some websites more than others?

That’s essentially what E-E-A-T is all about.

It’s a topic I’ve spent a lot of time with - I presented a Whiteboard Friday on Moz about E-E-A-T quick wins, and it comes up in almost every audit I do (especially for clients in finance, healthcare and legal).

If you’d prefer to watch, here’s that Whiteboard Friday:

In this guide, I’ll explain what E-E-A-T actually is, clear up the biggest misconception about it, and share practical ways you can improve it on your own website.

Let’s get started.

What is E-E-A-T?

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness.

It comes from Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines (announced in December 2022) - the document Google gives to the thousands of human raters who evaluate the quality of its search results.

The concept started out as E-A-T, and in December 2022 Google added the extra E for Experience. That addition matters more than people realise, because it signals what Google wants to reward: content from people who have actually done the thing they’re writing about, not just researched it.

Essentially, E-E-A-T is Google’s framework for answering one question: can this content, and the person or business behind it, be trusted?

Is E-E-A-T a ranking factor?

Here’s the misconception I mentioned - and it’s worth being precise about.

E-E-A-T isn’t specifically a ranking factor that Google uses.

There’s no E-E-A-T score that the algorithm calculates and uses to rank your pages - Google has said this themselves.

But that doesn’t make it unimportant.

The way I see it, E-E-A-T works on two levels.

First, Google’s systems are designed to reward the signals that demonstrate experience, expertise, authority and trust - things like who wrote the content, what credentials they have, and what other trusted sites say about you. The raters use E-E-A-T to check whether the algorithm is getting this right, and every core update tunes it further in that direction.

Second, and just as important: if users can’t trust you, they’re probably not going to buy from you.

Even if E-E-A-T did nothing for rankings, demonstrating real expertise and trustworthiness is what turns a visitor into a customer. That’s why I treat it as a commercial exercise, not just an SEO one.

Breaking down the four elements

Experience

Has the content creator actually used the product, visited the place, or done the work?

A review written by someone who bought and used the product demonstrates experience. A “review” assembled from other people’s reviews doesn’t - and Google has become noticeably better at telling the difference.

This is also the element that AI-generated content struggles with most, which is exactly why Google added it when they did.

Expertise

Does the creator have the knowledge or qualifications to cover this topic properly?

Expertise can be formal (a dentist writing about dental treatment) or genuine life experience (a person with a health condition sharing what helped them). What matters is that the content demonstrates depth that a non-expert couldn’t fake.

Authoritativeness

Is the creator or website a recognised source on this topic?

Authority is largely about what others say about you - the publications that cite you, the sites that link to you, the events that ask you to speak. You can’t declare yourself an authority. You accumulate evidence of it.

Trustworthiness

Google is explicit about this one, calling trust “the most important member of the E-E-A-T family.”

The other three exist to support it.

Trust covers accuracy, honesty, transparency and safety - accurate content, clear information about who runs the site, real contact details, secure pages, and honest claims about what you offer.

Why E-E-A-T matters more in the AI era

Two things have made E-E-A-T more important than when I first started talking about it.

The first is the flood of AI-generated content. Anyone can now publish a thousand generic articles overnight, and I see the results in audits all the time - sites full of content with nothing that proves a human with real experience was involved. The signals that separate genuine expertise from that filler have become the deciding factor, and Google’s core updates keep leaning harder on them.

The second is AI search itself. When ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google’s AI Overviews decide which sources to cite, they lean on the same trust signals - named experts, corroborated claims, consistent entity information across the web. The work you do on E-E-A-T is the same work that gets you cited in AI answers, which is why it’s a core part of my generative engine optimisation services (I’ve also written a full guide to optimising for Google’s AI Overviews).

How to improve your E-E-A-T

So, how do you actually improve E-E-A-T?

These are the practical improvements I recommend most often - the same quick wins I covered on Moz, expanded with what I’ve seen working since.

1. Put real authors on your content

Anonymous content will get you nowhere with E-E-A-T.

Reason being, Google wants to know who is behind the content - so every article should have a named author with a bio that states their actual credentials, linking through to a fuller author page.

2. Build a proper about page

Your about page is where Google’s raters (and your customers) go to work out who you are. Mine covers who I am, what I’ve done, the industries I’ve worked across and where my work has been featured - because claims need evidence behind them.

3. Show your experience, don’t just claim it

Case studies, real results, photos of you doing the work, first-hand details that only someone who was there would know.

One genuine example will do far more for you than ten paragraphs of claiming to be the best.

4. Cite your sources

If you make factual claims, link to where the facts come from. It demonstrates the content was researched properly, and it’s one of the simplest trust signals there is.

5. Collect and display reviews

Reviews are third-party evidence of trustworthiness. Google reads them, raters check them, and (most importantly) customers decide based on them. A consistent, ethical process for gathering reviews pays back over and over.

6. Use schema markup for your entities

Person and Organization schema with sameAs links to your profiles helps Google connect your content to a real, verifiable entity. It’s the machine-readable half of everything above - and it’s how I’ve structured my own site.

7. Earn mentions on sites Google already trusts

Authority comes from the outside.

Coverage in industry publications, expert commentary, speaking slots and podcast appearances all build the external evidence that you’re a recognised voice - and this is where digital PR comes in.

E-E-A-T and YMYL: where the bar is highest

Google applies its strictest quality standards to Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) topics - content that could affect someone’s health, finances, safety or legal situation.

If you operate in finance, healthcare or legal, E-E-A-T isn’t optional - it’s the entry requirement. Anonymous content in these sectors gets filtered out a little more with every update, while businesses with real credentials on display keep gaining. If that’s your world, the seven improvements above should be at the top of your SEO to-do list, not the bottom.

Final thoughts

At its core, E-E-A-T is Google formalising something that was always true: people trust content from people who know what they’re talking about. The web increasingly rewards businesses that can prove it.

The good news is that if you genuinely have the experience and expertise, demonstrating it is entirely within your control - and most of your competitors won’t bother, which is exactly why it’s such a big opportunity.

If you’d like help building the trust signals that move rankings in your industry, get in touch - or have a look at how I approach it across my SEO services 🙂