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, the handbook human raters use to evaluate search results. Google added the first “E”, for Experience, in December 2022; before that the concept was known as E-A-T.

The four parts are not equal. The guidelines place Trust at the center: experience, expertise and authority all feed into whether a page can be trusted, and an untrustworthy page has low E-E-A-T however expert it looks.

What E-E-A-T is — and isn’t

E-E-A-T is not a single ranking factor and there is no E-E-A-T score. Raters don’t change rankings directly; their assessments help Google evaluate whether its systems are working. Google’s guide to creating helpful, reliable, people-first content explains that its systems use a mix of signals to identify content that demonstrates these qualities, and that they matter most for “Your Money or Your Life” topics — health, finance, safety and similar areas where bad information causes real harm.

Why it matters for AI search

AI answer engines face the same problem as Google: choosing sources they can safely repeat. Clear authorship, dates, cited sources and specific first-hand detail make a page easier to verify and more defensible to cite. A page with no author, no date and no sources gives a generative system — or the ranking systems behind AI Overviews — little reason to prefer it over a source that shows its work.

Showing E-E-A-T on a page

• A visible byline linked to an author page that explains the person’s background and why they’re qualified.
• Evidence of first-hand experience: original photos, test results, measurements, screenshots, specific details a non-user wouldn’t know.
• Published and updated dates that are honest — not refreshed without real changes.
• Citations to primary sources for factual claims.
• Clear “about” and contact information, policies, and who owns the site.

Structured data can make authorship explicit to machines:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Article",
  "headline": "We tested 12 trail shoes on wet rock",
  "datePublished": "2026-09-14",
  "dateModified": "2026-10-20",
  "author": {
    "@type": "Person",
    "name": "Maya Lindqvist",
    "url": "https://example.com/authors/maya-lindqvist",
    "jobTitle": "Mountain guide"
  }
}
</script>

Common mistakes

Inventing author personas, adding credentials nobody can verify, padding thin articles with “expert” quotes, and treating E-E-A-T as a checklist of badges rather than a description of genuinely useful content. A generic page with a fancy author box is still thin content.

How to check

The AI SEO Checker looks for author and date signals, entity structured data, citations and freshness as part of its AI-visibility score, and tells you which signals are missing. It can’t judge whether your expertise is real — that part is up to you.

Frequently asked questions