Google's E-E-A-T framework — Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust — determines how much Google trusts your content. Sites with strong E-E-A-T signals rank more consistently and recover faster from algorithm updates.
| Component | What Google looks for | How to demonstrate it |
|---|---|---|
| Experience | First-hand experience with the topic | Personal anecdotes, case studies, original photos, "I tested this" content |
| Expertise | Knowledge and qualifications | Author credentials, professional bio, detailed technically accurate content |
| Authoritativeness | Recognition from others | Backlinks from trusted sites, press mentions, industry awards, citations |
| Trust | Accuracy, transparency, security | HTTPS, contact info, privacy policy, sourced claims, review platform presence |
Anonymous content scores poorly for E-E-A-T. Add the author's name, photo, credentials and a brief bio to every article. Link to their LinkedIn or professional profile. Add Person schema markup identifying the author explicitly.
Google quality raters check About pages. Describe who runs the site, their qualifications and experience, why they are the right source for this content, and how to contact them. Be specific — vague About pages do not help.
Link to primary sources for factual claims — studies, official data, government guidance. This signals you are confident in your information and willing to be verified.
E-E-A-T is not a ranking factor. There is no E-E-A-T score inside Google, no number attached to your domain, and no algorithm that reads your author bio and adjusts your position. Anyone selling you an "E-E-A-T score" has invented it.
What it actually is: a set of criteria in the guidelines given to Google's human quality raters — people employed to assess whether search results are good. Those raters do not change rankings. Their judgements are used to evaluate whether algorithm changes made the results better or worse, which means E-E-A-T describes the target Google's algorithms are aiming at, not the mechanism by which they aim.
That distinction matters enormously in practice. It means you cannot optimise for E-E-A-T directly, because there is nothing to optimise against. What you can do is become the thing the raters are told to look for — and the algorithms, over time, get better at finding it. This is why E-E-A-T work is slow, cumulative, and resistant to shortcuts, and why the sites that treat it as a checklist of author boxes and credential badges see no result.
The second E was added late, and it is the one most content fails. Experience asks: has the person writing this actually done the thing? A review of a hotel written by someone who stayed there is different from one assembled from other reviews, and the difference is visible in the text — the specific detail, the thing that went wrong, the observation nobody would think to fabricate.
This is the component AI-generated content fails most completely and most obviously. A model can produce a competent summary of what is known about a topic. It cannot produce the sentence that begins "when I tried this, the thing that actually broke was..." — and that sentence is what experience looks like in prose.
Does the author know the subject? For most commercial content this is the easiest component to satisfy and the one businesses over-invest in, because it feels addressable: add credentials, add an author box, cite sources. Worth doing, and rarely the thing holding a page back.
Is this site recognised, by others, as a source on this subject? Not "does it claim to be" — is it cited, linked to, referenced. Authority is conferred rather than declared, and it is the component over which you have least direct control.
Google's own guidance is explicit that trust is the most important of the four, and that the others exist largely in support of it. A page can demonstrate experience, expertise and authority and still fail if the site behind it is untrustworthy — no contact details, no ownership disclosed, misleading claims, an unsafe checkout.
The practical implication is that the boring pages matter more than most content strategies admit. Your about page, your contact details, your terms, your privacy policy, a real address, a real name attached to the business — these are trust signals, and their absence undermines every piece of content on the domain.
Your Money or Your Life. Google applies a materially higher bar to content that could affect someone's health, financial stability, safety or wellbeing. Medical advice, legal guidance, financial products, and anything where bad information does real damage.
On a YMYL topic, the tolerance for unverified content collapses. A page about the best recipe for shortbread can be written by an enthusiastic amateur and rank perfectly well. A page about drug interactions cannot, and the reason is not a penalty — it is that the algorithms have been tuned, over years, toward sources that raters judged trustworthy, and on these topics the raters were told to be uncompromising.
Two consequences worth being clear about:
Google's position is that it does not penalise content for being AI-generated. That statement is true and it is routinely misread as permission.
The full position is that Google rewards content that demonstrates E-E-A-T, regardless of how it was produced — and that most AI-generated content fails to demonstrate any of it. Not because a machine wrote it, but because of what machine-written content structurally lacks: it has no experience, because the model did not do the thing; it has no author, because nobody is accountable for it; and it is not corroborated, because nobody else has any reason to reference it.
The quality rater guidelines were updated to direct raters to mark content as lowest quality where it shows little effort, originality or added value — a description that fits the great majority of pages produced at volume by a model with no editorial hand on them.
The workable use of AI in content is as a drafting tool underneath a person who has genuine experience, checks every claim, adds what only they know, and puts their name on the result. The unworkable use — and the one now being sold hardest — is generating pages at volume, which produces exactly the thin, uncorroborated, unattributed content that this framework exists to filter out.
E-E-A-T cannot be fixed in a sprint. It can be built, and the sequence matters because the early steps are cheap and the later ones are not.
First, fix trust. This is the fastest and most neglected. Real business details, a real address, a named owner, contactable support, a proper about page, honest terms. A weekend of work, and it underpins everything else.
Second, attribute everything. Put a real name on every page, belonging to a person who exists and whose expertise is verifiable. Anonymous content cannot demonstrate expertise or experience by construction — there is nobody for the signal to attach to.
Third, add what only you have. The data from your own operations. The photograph you took. The thing that failed when you tried it. This is the only component that cannot be copied from a competitor, and it is therefore the only one that constitutes a durable advantage.
Fourth, remove what is dragging you down. Thin, unattributed, uncorroborated pages are a site-level liability. Deleting or consolidating them raises the average quality of the domain, which is a legitimate action and almost never recommended, because nobody sells a service for it.
Fifth, earn corroboration. Slow, external, and not purchasable safely. It is the last step because it is the one you cannot do alone.
No. It is a set of criteria in the guidelines given to Google's human quality raters, whose judgements are used to evaluate algorithm changes rather than to adjust rankings directly. It describes the target the algorithms aim at, not the mechanism. This is why there is no E-E-A-T score, and why anyone selling one has invented it.
Trust. Google's own guidance states this explicitly, and that the other three exist largely in support of it. A page can demonstrate experience, expertise and authority and still fail if the site behind it hides its ownership, has no contact details, or makes misleading claims.
Not for being AI-generated. But most AI-generated content fails E-E-A-T structurally: it has no experience behind it, no accountable author, and no external corroboration. The rater guidelines direct raters to mark content showing little effort, originality or added value as lowest quality — which describes most content produced at volume without an editorial hand.
Only if there is a real, verifiable person behind them. An author box for someone who exists nowhere else on the internet adds nothing, and if noticed, damages trust rather than building it.
If your content could affect someone's health, financial stability, safety or wellbeing, yes — and the bar rises sharply. This catches far more businesses than expect it: accountancy, legal services, insurance, supplements, employment advice. On these topics, thin content is not merely weak; it is disqualifying.
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