E-E-A-T Full Report: Every Experience and Trust Signal
This example shows the full E-E-A-T signal breakdown for a health content site — showing all 40+ individual checks across all four E-E-A-T categories with pass/fail/warn status for each. Total score 65/100. The most impactful fixes are adding author credentials (Expertise) and a medical disclaimer (Trust).
This is the most important thing on the page, and it contradicts how almost every tool in this category presents its output, including the numbers above.
E-E-A-T — Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust — is a framework set out in Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines. It describes what human raters should look for when judging whether search results are any good. Those raters do not rank your pages. Their judgements are used in aggregate to evaluate whether a proposed change to the ranking systems makes results better or worse. Google does not compute an E-E-A-T value for a URL, there is no field in Search Console reporting one, and no schema property confers it.
So what is 65/100? It is this tool's model of how many of the observable characteristics described in those guidelines your page displays: whether an author is named, whether the dates are real, whether sources are cited, whether the organisation behind the site is identifiable. Every one of those is worth having. None of them is a dial connected to a ranking system.
Read the report as a checklist for making the content credible to a human being. That is what the guidelines are for, and it happens to be the only durable route to the ranking outcome anyway.
The expertise category scoring lowest on a health site is not a marketing problem. YMYL — Your Money or Your Life — is the category Google's raters apply the strictest standard to, and the reason is simply that a wrong answer about a medication interaction can hurt somebody. The remedy is not more markup.
A clinician's name, or nobody's
Health content should be written or reviewed by someone qualified to be wrong in public about it. A named author with a checkable registration is not a signal you are adding; it is accountability. If nobody qualified will put their name to a page, that is information about the page.
Primary literature, not other content sites
Citing a systematic review or a regulator's guidance is meaningfully different from citing another blog that cited a blog. The citation should be specific enough that a reader can check it, and the claim on your page should be what the source actually says — which is where most health content quietly breaks.
Reviewed dates must reflect an actual review
A "last reviewed" date is a claim that somebody looked at this and confirmed it still holds. Bumping it automatically to look fresh is a lie in a context where the lie has consequences, and it destroys the only value the field has. If nobody reviewed it, the date should not move.
General information, clearly framed as such
Content that could be mistaken for individual clinical advice needs to say plainly that it is not, and needs to tell the reader when to speak to a professional instead. This is not a legal formality. It is the difference between informing somebody and misleading them.
The most persistent myth in this area is that author.sameAs, knowsAbout and jobTitle improve E-E-A-T. They do not, because there is nothing to improve — no property of your markup produces authority, and no system reads a jobTitle and concludes that the author is qualified.
What Person markup with a stable @id actually does is entity disambiguation. It tells a machine that the Jane Smith on this article is the same Jane Smith on the other forty, and, through sameAs, that she is the same person as a profile elsewhere. This is genuinely useful: without it, a system reading forty articles has no basis for treating one author as one person, and anything it then says about her expertise is invented rather than derived.
But it only works if there is an entity to disambiguate. sameAs pointing at three empty profiles connects nothing. A knowsAbout array listing six specialisms for a writer with no publications, no registration and no presence anywhere else is a decorative assertion, and it is precisely the kind of thing that makes structured data untrustworthy.
The order is not negotiable: get someone qualified to write or review the content, name them visibly on the page, then mark that up. Markup describes what is there. It does not create it.
The claim that AI engines preferentially cite pages with strong credibility markup is made constantly and has never been verified by anyone. No assistant operator publishes its retrieval logic, none has stated that it weights author schema, and nobody outside those companies is in a position to know.
Here is the version that survives scrutiny. Retrieval systems generally parse the HTML they are served rather than rendering it like a browser. So content in the initial response reaches them — including a visible byline, an explicit date, a named source, and accurate JSON-LD. That markup disambiguates: it says this string is the author, that one is the publication date. A parser that would otherwise guess now does not have to.
Disambiguation is a real benefit and it is worth having. It is not the same as being preferred, it is not proportional to how much schema you add, and it will not rescue a page whose substance is thin. The pages that get cited are the ones that contain the answer, written so it can be lifted out and still make sense. Everything on this report is a precondition for that page being read correctly. None of it is a substitute for writing it.
Fix this first, and fix it with people
The lowest score, on a health site, in the category where the stakes are highest. It is also the only category that cannot be closed by editing HTML: it closes by having qualified people write and review the content, and by naming them. Everything else on this page is cheaper and matters less.
Show the first-hand part
Experience is the E that most content silently lacks: evidence that somebody actually did the thing, saw the thing, treated the patient, ran the test. Original photographs, specifics that could only come from having been there, honest accounts of what did not work. It cannot be asserted, only demonstrated.
The floor, and the easiest to hold
HTTPS, a real About page, a contact route that reaches a human, a correction policy, no hidden ownership. Cheap, mechanical, and the category where a failure is most obviously disqualifying to a reader. Keep it clean and move on.
Mostly earned elsewhere
This is the category you have least direct control over: it reflects whether other credible sources treat you as credible. You cannot mark it up. You earn it by publishing work worth citing over a long period, and the score moves slowly regardless of what you do this quarter.
Note the pattern: the two categories that a tool can most easily measure are the two you can least easily change, and the category that matters most on this site is the one no tool can fix. That is uncomfortable, and it is the honest reading of the report.
What are the most important E-E-A-T signals?
The signals worth building are the ones that make a page verifiable by a reader: a named author with real, checkable credentials; publication and last-reviewed dates that are true; citations to primary sources rather than to other blogs; HTTPS; About and Contact pages that identify a real organisation; and Organization schema with sameAs links. Note what sameAs actually does — it is entity disambiguation, connecting your organisation or author to profiles that describe the same entity elsewhere. It confers no authority, and it helps only if the entity genuinely exists to be found. None of these is a ranking signal in itself; they are what credible content looks like, which is the point.
Does E-E-A-T affect AI search citation?
Not in the way that claim usually implies, and it is worth being precise. E-E-A-T is criteria used by Google's human quality raters; it is not a score attached to your pages, and no assistant computes it either. There is no verified evidence that ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity preferentially cite pages carrying credential markup, and no operator publishes its retrieval logic. What is defensible is narrower: retrieval systems generally parse served HTML rather than rendering it, so named authors, dated content, explicit sources and accurate schema in the initial response reach them and disambiguate what they read. Clear attribution helps a machine work out who said what. It does not confer authority, and no schema property ever will.
What is YMYL content and why does it need stronger E-E-A-T?
YMYL (Your Money Your Life) content covers topics that could affect a person's health, financial situation, safety or wellbeing — medical advice, legal guidance, financial information, news about important events. Google applies significantly stricter E-E-A-T evaluation to YMYL pages because inaccurate content in these areas could cause real harm. Health and finance pages should have expert author credentials, medical/legal disclaimers and external citations.
Is there an E-E-A-T score Google calculates for my site?
No. E-E-A-T is a framework set out in Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines, used by human raters who assess whether search results are good. Their judgements are used in aggregate to evaluate whether ranking changes improve results; they are not applied to your URLs, and Google does not compute an E-E-A-T value for any page. The score of 65/100 in this report is this tool's model of how well the page displays the characteristics the guidelines describe. That is a useful checklist. It is not a number Google can see, and any tool presenting it as one is misrepresenting what it measured.
If it is not a ranking factor, why should I fix any of this?
Because the checks describe what credible content looks like, and credible content is what Google's ranking systems are built to reward — indirectly, through everything from what people link to and cite, to how quality raters judge the results the systems produce. A page with a named expert author, honest dates, and citations to primary research is a better page than one without, and on a health site it is also the difference between publishing responsibly and publishing recklessly. Fix these because they make the content trustworthy, and let the ranking follow from that rather than treating it as the objective.
What actually makes YMYL content different?
The stakes, and therefore the standard applied to it. YMYL — Your Money or Your Life — covers content that could affect someone's health, finances, safety or wellbeing, and Google's raters are instructed to apply a much stricter standard of expertise and accuracy to it, because a wrong answer can do real harm. For a health site this is not a compliance exercise. It means the medical claims need a clinician's name against them, the sources need to be primary literature rather than other content sites, the review date needs to reflect an actual review, and anything that could be mistaken for individual medical advice needs to be clearly framed as general information.
Does adding author schema with credentials improve my standing?
It makes attribution machine-readable, and that is all. No schema property confers E-E-A-T, and adding jobTitle or knowsAbout to a Person node does not make anybody an expert. What Person markup with a stable @id does is remove ambiguity: it lets a system link the same author across your pages and, via sameAs, to profiles elsewhere that describe the same person. That is genuinely useful, and it is worthless if the credentials are decorative. The order is: have a real expert write or review the content, name them, then mark them up. Reversing that order produces a well-marked-up page that is still wrong.
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