EEAT is Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust: the framework Google’s quality raters use to judge whether a page deserves to be believed. It gets talked about like a ranking factor you can switch on, and that framing causes most of the bad advice around it. Here’s what it is, how it reaches your rankings, and how to show each letter with things you can prove.
Where EEAT lives and how it touches rankings
The framework comes from the Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines. Raters score sample results with it, and those scores benchmark the ranking systems. So there’s no EEAT score attached to your site. There are ranking signals Google believes correlate with what raters call EEAT, and the systems chase those. Google has said this directly. The distinction matters because it tells you what works: making trustworthiness visible and provable, so that whatever proxies exist can find it.
The second E, Experience, was added in December 2022, and it was the interesting one: first-hand use, having actually been there, done it, bought it. It’s also the letter a small site can win on, because experience can’t be outsourced to a content agency.
The 4 letters, with the proof that shows each one
- Experience: evidence you did the thing. Your own photos, your own measurements, specifics that only come from contact with the subject. A review with an unboxing photo and a complaint about the fiddly battery cover reads differently from a spec-sheet rewrite, to readers and to raters.
- Expertise: the author knows the field. Credentials where they exist, demonstrated depth where they don’t. Bylines that link to a real author page with a body of work in the same subject.
- Authoritativeness: others treat you as a source. Citations, mentions, links from places with their own standing. This letter is earned off-site and takes the longest.
- Trust: the guidelines call this the most important member of the family. Accurate content, honest about uncertainty, sourced claims, a contactable human behind the site, no dark patterns. The other 3 letters exist to support this one.
This site as a worked example
I’d rather show the homework than assign it. On this site: the update history cites Google’s status dashboard for every date instead of asking you to trust my memory. Claims that go beyond Google’s statements get labelled as my reading. The about page says who I am and what I’ve worked on. And when a popular claim fails verification, it gets called out in print. That’s EEAT as practice: every choice is something a reader could check.
What doesn’t work
- Fake author personas with stock photos. This has been caught repeatedly, and it converts a quality problem into a trust problem, the worse of the two.
- Credential padding: ‘reviewed by our editorial team’ with no named humans attached.
- EEAT audits that produce a schema checklist. Schema markup describes your trust signals to machines; it can’t create signals you don’t have. Author schema on a ghost is still a ghost.
- Treating it as a one-off project. The bar moves with your topic’s stakes; the YMYL guide covers where it sits highest.
Sources
The quality rater guidelines and Google’s people-first content guidance, which includes the EEAT self-assessment questions. Statements about how proxies work are Google’s; judgements about what wins are mine.