E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) is Google's framework for judging whether content deserves trust. It is not a ranking score you can optimise directly — it is built from verifiable signals: named authors with real histories, accurate claims, admitted corrections, and an identity other sites confirm.
What is E-E-A-T, really?
E-E-A-T lives in Google's quality rater guidelines — the manual human raters use to grade search results. It does not produce a number in Google's algorithm. Instead, the qualities raters look for correspond to things algorithms can approximate: who wrote this, why believe them, is the site what it claims to be, and does the wider web agree. Chasing "E-E-A-T optimisation" as a tactic misses the point; building a site a sceptical stranger could verify is the point.
Which signals actually move the needle?
- Named, findable authors — a real person with a history outside your site, linked from every article. "Team Blog" is a trust void.
- First-hand evidence — original screenshots, original data, named clients, things only someone who did the work could know. This is the Experience arm, and the hardest to fake.
- An editorial policy with teeth — how you research, what you refuse to publish, and a public corrections log. Counter-intuitively, admitting errors builds more trust than never being wrong.
- Legal and contact reality — registered company details, a real address, a reachable human. Anonymous operations fail the sniff test.
- Corroboration — other sites referencing you as you describe yourself. Self-description is a claim; third-party description is evidence.
What does not work?
Author pages invented for people who do not exist, credential badges with nothing behind them, and "as reviewed by" names attached to content the reviewer never saw. Raters and algorithms are both trained to spot hollow signals, and getting caught faking trust is worse than never claiming it. If a signal cannot survive one phone call of verification, do not publish it.
How does E-E-A-T change in the AI era?
AI answer engines are, in effect, automated quality raters with a legal department. They preferentially cite sources they can attribute and defend: named authors, dated claims, consistent entities. The same investments that satisfy human raters make your content safe for a model to quote — which is why E-E-A-T stopped being an SEO concern and became a citation concern.
How do you start if your site has no trust signals today?
Start with what costs nothing: put a named person on every article with a real bio page, publish your company registration details where they are easy to find, and write an honest editorial policy — then keep it. Add the harder layers as you earn them: original data from your own work, named clients willing to be referenced, and a corrections log with real entries. Trust compounds exactly like authority does — slowly, then visibly.
The standard we hold ourselves to — corrections log included.