E-E-A-T explained: experience, expertise, authority, trust

The four parts

Experience: Is the writer drawing on their own experience of the subject?
Expertise: Does the source know its subject?
Authoritativeness: Do others cite it as a source?
Trustworthiness: Is the site honest, secure, transparent and accurate? Trust is regarded as the most important part.

Not a direct ranking factor

Google uses E-E-A-T in the guidelines for its human quality raters, to assess the quality of results. Its systems reward signals that fit with it, but there is no “E-E-A-T score”.

How to show it

Name the author and give their background
Back up statements with sources or examples
Provide a complete legal notice, contact details and privacy policy
Keep content up to date and state the date
Show real experience: projects, results, mistakes and solutions
Reviews and mentions by others

Important for sensitive topics

Higher standards apply to topics around health, money or law. There, proven expertise and transparency are particularly important.

Example: two author boxes compared

A guide on website costs can end with the note “Editorial team”, or with a box that says who wrote it, what role that person has in the company, how long they have worked in the field and when the text was last checked. The second version gives readers and reviewers something concrete to go on. You should only state what is true and can be backed up. Invented titles or years of experience damage trust more than they help.

What experience means in practice

The first E was added at the end of 2022. It refers to content that clearly comes from first-hand knowledge: your own photos rather than pure stock images, descriptions of how a project went, what went wrong and how it was solved. A text about laying tiles reads differently when the author describes the process on site than when they string together general tips.

Myth versus fact

Myth: You can build in E-E-A-T with a plugin. Fact: There is no plugin and no markup that creates E-E-A-T. It comes from genuine information and genuine quality.
Myth: Without a doctorate you have no chance. Fact: What matters is demonstrable experience in the subject. For everyday topics, lived practice is enough; formal qualifications become more important mainly for sensitive topics.
Myth: More texts mean more authority. Fact: A small stock of accurate, well-maintained pages has more impact than many thin ones.

Checks for your own website

Who is behind the site? Can you tell within two clicks, for example via “About us” and the legal notice?
Does every guide have a date and a person responsible?
Are statements backed up, for example by providers’ own sources, legal provisions or your own projects?
Are there ways of getting in touch that actually work?
Is any information out of date, such as prices or staff who are no longer with the company?

Mistakes that cost trust

These include bought or obviously fake reviews, claims such as “test winner” without a source, a missing or incomplete legal notice, and texts that were clearly written only for search engines. Contradictory information on different pages also undermines the impression, even if each page looks good on its own. How the overall picture is built up is described in Content SEO.

How to check where you stand

Ask someone who does not know your company to spend three minutes on your website and then say who is behind it, what is offered and how they can tell the information is correct. Where they hesitate, there is usually a lack of evidence, names or examples. That conversation is more revealing than any checklist, because it shows what gets through to a real reader.