E-E-A-T

E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness: the four qualities Google’s search quality raters are trained to look for when they judge whether a page deserves the position its systems gave it. It is an evaluation framework, and Google says it is not itself a ranking factor.

The four qualities and the one that carries the rest

Google’s page on creating helpful, reliable, people-first content sets out the four and puts trust at the center: the other three contribute to it, and a page need not demonstrate all of them. Experience is first-hand: the writer has done, used or been through the thing. Expertise is knowing the subject. Authoritativeness is being recognized as a source by others. Trustworthiness is the page being accurate, honest and safe to act on. A tradesperson’s page about a repair they perform every week has experience and expertise by default; whether the page shows them is another matter.

What it means that it is not a ranking factor

The same page says that while E-E-A-T is not a specific ranking factor, Google uses a mix of signals that can identify content with good E-E-A-T, and that rater feedback does not change rankings directly but checks that the systems are doing what they should. So nothing on a page is scored for E-E-A-T. What happens is that the qualities leave evidence, an author name, a cited source, a consistent identity, a review a machine can parse, and the evidence is what systems and readers see. The framework is a description of what trustworthy pages tend to contain, written for the people who grade them.

A common question

How does a small business show E-E-A-T on its own site?

By making the four things checkable rather than claimed. Experience: pages that describe work actually done, with specifics. Expertise: who the people are, with a named author on advice pages. Authoritativeness: what others say, brought onto the page as readable text and rating markup rather than left on a review platform. Trust: one name, one address, one phone number, the same everywhere. This site’s audit of 9,483 small-business sites found the last two missing most often: 64.7% showed no review signal a crawler could read and 43.1% were inconsistent about their own name, address or phone.

Sources

The framework and its status: Google Search Central, creating helpful content. The two audit figures are this site’s own, from what 9,483 small business websites serve to an AI crawler; sample drawn per metro and trade, percentages describe the sample.