E-E-A-T

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust. It is the framework in Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines for judging whether content deserves to be shown — especially for "Your Money or Your Life" topics like health, finance, and safety, where bad information causes real harm. The first E, Experience, was added to reward genuine first-hand knowledge.

You cannot set an "E-E-A-T score", so demonstrate it instead: real, credentialed authors with bylines and bio pages; original data, screenshots, and first-hand examples rather than rephrased research; citations to authoritative sources; and clear site trust signals (ownership, contact, accurate information, policies). Build entity consistency so your experts and brand are recognisable across the web, and reinforce it with sameAs and author schema.

Trust is the member of the set that matters most — the others exist to support it. E-E-A-T is not a ranking factor you optimise directly; it is a lens that Google’s raters and, by proxy, its systems use to calibrate quality. In an era of mass-produced AI content, demonstrable human experience is becoming a durable moat: the harder something is to fake — real client outcomes, proprietary data, named practitioners — the more defensible your visibility.