What is E-E-A-T?
Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness: the quality signals that decide whether a source is worth quoting.
What E-E-A-T stands for
E-E-A-T is Google's framework for evaluating whether a page is worth trusting: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. It appears throughout Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines and shapes how human raters assess content, which in turn feeds signals Google's automated systems learn from.
The first E - Experience - was added in 2022 to weight first-hand experience alongside credentialed expertise. Trustworthiness sits at the centre and is the one signal Google says trumps the others when they conflict: an experienced, expert, authoritative source that is not trustworthy is still not something Google wants to surface.
How E-E-A-T shows up in AI answers
Google's AI Overviews and Gemini both ground in the same live search index and inherit the E-E-A-T weighting the classic ranker uses - one 2026 study attributes ~96% of AI Overview citations to sources Google would rate strong on E-E-A-T. On ChatGPT and Perplexity the effect is indirect (both use their own indices), but the underlying signals - author identification, credentials, publisher reputation, third-party corroboration - are what those engines' retrieval layers reward too.
Concretely: pages with a named, credentialled author (linked to a real Person entity and a real bio), a clearly identified publisher, honest sourcing, and third-party references get cited more consistently than anonymous or thinly-attributed content.
Also known as: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness, EEAT.
Frequently asked questions
- How do I improve E-E-A-T on my site?
- Byline every article to a real author with a bio page (linked from the article, with credentials and their sameAs profiles). Ship Organization and Person schema tied by @id. Cite named sources with methodology and dates in-line. Earn genuine third-party mentions from sources in your category. E-E-A-T is not a checkbox you tick; it is a pattern the engine's ranker and the answer-engine grounding layers pick up over months.
- Is E-E-A-T a ranking factor?
- Not directly. Google says E-E-A-T is a concept human raters use, not an algorithmic score. But the signals raters look for (author identification, credentials, publisher reputation, corroborated claims) are also the signals Google's ranking and AI-surface systems learn to reward. In practice acting as though E-E-A-T is a ranking signal is closer to right than treating it as marketing copy.
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