E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. It is the framework Google's human quality raters use to evaluate a webpage and the people behind it. The extra "E" for Experience was added in December 2022 to reward first-hand, real-world knowledge over purely theoretical content. E-E-A-T is documented in Google's public Search Quality Rater Guidelines.
Why it matters
Pages that demonstrate strong E-E-A-T tend to rank better, especially for YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) topics like health, finance, and legal advice where misinformation causes real harm. Quality raters do not directly change rankings, but their judgements train the algorithms that do. Weak signals — anonymous authors, missing citations, no clear ownership, no contact details — push borderline content down in competitive queries and make it harder for new content to be trusted at all.
How to improve it
- Show real author bios with credentials, photos, and links to professional profiles.
- Cite primary sources and keep dates and statistics current.
- Build backlinks from topically relevant, authoritative domains rather than chasing volume.
- Serve the site over HTTPS and publish a clear privacy policy, terms, and contact page.
- Add Article and Person structured data so search engines can connect content to verified authors.
- Write meaningful titles and a meta description that match the page intent.