SEO & Search
What Is E-E-A-T?
Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness: the framework Google's quality raters use to judge content, and why it is not a ranking factor.
Definition
E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. It is a concept from Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines, the document given to the external raters who evaluate whether Google's ranking systems are producing good results. Google added the first E, for experience, in December 2022.
What each letter means
- Experience: whether the author has first hand exposure to the subject, such as having used the product or visited the place
- Expertise: whether the author has relevant knowledge or skill in the topic
- Authoritativeness: whether the creator or the site is a recognised source on the topic
- Trustworthiness: whether the page is accurate, honest and safe. Google describes trust as the most important member of the family
It is not a ranking factor
This distinction gets lost regularly. Rater scores do not feed back into rankings for the pages that were rated. The guidelines describe what Google wants its systems to reward, so the framework is a good statement of intent, but there is no E-E-A-T score inside the ranking systems to optimise against.
What it looks like in practice
Because it is a judgement about a page and its source rather than a metric, the practical work is evidential. Name the author and say who they are. Date the content and show when it was reviewed. Cite primary sources instead of paraphrasing secondary ones. Make ownership, contact details and corrections policy easy to find.
Trust is the most important member of the E-E-A-T family because untrustworthy pages have low E-E-A-T no matter how Experienced, Expert, or Authoritative they may seem.