E-E-A-T
E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust — the framework in Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines used to assess content quality. It is not a ranking factor and produces no score. It is a bundle of evidence signals, such as named authors, verifiable credentials, first-hand experience, and consistent entity data, that human raters and algorithms evaluate.
Why E-E-A-T matters for an existing site
Anyone selling you an “E-E-A-T optimization package” is selling you a score that doesn’t exist. There’s no dial, no percentage, no thing to buy. It’s evidence — and evidence is cheap when the site’s already live. Four proofs, each under an hour: a named author with Person schema, a sameAs pointing at a real profile, a visible dateModified, and one first-person scar per page (the thing you actually did, that went wrong or right). That’s it. You’re not optimising a metric. You’re leaving fingerprints a rater and a model can both check, so the page reads as written by someone who was there instead of assembled by someone who wasn’t.
| Letter | What it means | Cheapest proof on a live site |
|---|---|---|
| Experience | First-hand use of the thing | One first-person line per page (“I deleted 400 pages…”) |
| Expertise | Demonstrable subject skill | Named author + Person schema |
| Authoritativeness | Recognised by others | sameAs to a real profile; earned mentions |
| Trust | Accurate, current, safe | Visible dateModified + real citations and contact |
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