E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust) is Google's framework for judging whether the person behind a piece of content is actually credible on the topic. It started in Google's quality guidelines and increasingly shapes what AI engines are willing to cite.
Strip it back and it's four questions an evaluator, human rater or algorithm, asks of a page. Has the author actually done the thing (experience)? Do they genuinely know the subject (expertise)? Are they and the site treated as a real reference (authoritativeness)? Can the content be relied on as accurate and honest (trust)? Trust is the one the other three feed.
You can't read E-E-A-T off a dashboard as a single score; it's more of a lens. But the signals it rests on are concrete and movable: a named author, real credentials, cited sources, plain accuracy, a reputation that precedes you.
It's the human-credibility half of source authority. Where authority also counts structural things like corroboration and a consistent entity record, E-E-A-T is specifically about the person. An anonymous, machine-spun blog post scores below the same words carrying a named, credentialed byline and real citations. As engines lean harder on trustworthy sources to avoid being confidently wrong, that credibility increasingly decides who gets cited and not only who ranks.
Raising it is unglamorous. Put real, qualified names on your content. Show first-hand experience through original data or the kind of detail only a practitioner would know. Cite your sources and keep the facts current. Keep the author and company presence consistent enough that a knowledge graph can vouch for it. A health piece bylined by a named MD with cited studies simply reads as more trustworthy than an anonymous, sourceless version of the same text, and that's the copy an engine reaches for.
Related terms
- Source Authority: E-E-A-T is its human-credibility half
- Knowledge Graph: corroborates author and entity credibility
- Answer Engine Optimization (AEO): credibility feeds the citation decision