E-E-A-T explained, and what it actually asks you to do

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust. It gets discussed as though it were a dial in the algorithm you can turn. It is not, and understanding what it actually is changes what you do about it.

What each letter is asking

Experience — has whoever wrote this actually done it? Used the product, visited the place, run the process. This is the letter added in late 2022, and it was added at the point when fluent, confident, entirely second-hand content became trivially easy to produce.

Expertise — do they know the subject properly? Formal qualifications count where they exist. So does the plumber of twenty years who has never written an exam.

Authoritativeness — is this person or site a recognised source on the subject? This is the one that is largely earned elsewhere, through other people citing and referencing you.

Trust — is the site accurate, transparent and safe to act on? Google describes this as the most important of the four, with the other three contributing to it.

YMYL, and why the bar moves

Google holds some subjects to a much higher standard than others. Your Money or Your Life covers anything that could affect someone’s health, finances, safety or major life decisions.

A wrong answer about sourdough hydration costs someone a loaf. A wrong answer about a drug interaction or a pension transfer costs considerably more. If you publish in a YMYL area, expect the credibility bar to be far higher — and expect thin content to be filtered harder than it would be elsewhere.

What actually changes anything

In rough order of impact

0/ 7

Put a real person’s name on the contentWith a bio that says who they are and why they would know. Most small business sites publish anonymously, which forfeits the whole category before it starts.
Write from things you have actually doneReal examples, real numbers, real cases — including the ones that did not go to plan. This is the only part that cannot be faked, which is exactly why it counts.
Make the business identifiableAddress, phone number, company number, a photo of an actual person. Consistent everywhere it appears — your site, your Google Business Profile, directories.
Show what other people sayReviews, testimonials and case studies. Third-party evidence is worth more than any claim you make about yourself.
Get cited by sources that already have authorityThe slowest item and the one that most separates sites. It overlaps almost entirely with link building.
Cover the basics of trustHTTPS, a privacy policy, clear terms, working contact details, no dark patterns. Individually trivial, collectively load-bearing.
Add Person and Organization structured dataIt does not create credibility — it makes existing credibility machine-readable, and connects your content to a named entity rather than a byline.

How this site does it, as a worked example

Since it would be poor form to write this and not apply it: every page here carries a Person node in its structured data, all referencing one identifier, authored on the about page — so every article is connected to a named human rather than a floating byline.

Every figure quoted on the site traces to a Search Console export I will show anyone who asks, the case studies name what did not work as well as what did, and the numbers I cannot verify are labelled as illustrative rather than dressed up as results.

None of that is markup. The markup only describes it.

The short version

E-E-A-T is not something you add. It is a description of being a real, identifiable, competent business that publishes things it actually knows — and then a small amount of technical work making that legible to software.

The businesses that struggle with it are almost never the unqualified ones. They are the anonymous ones.

Common questions

Is E-E-A-T a ranking factor?

No, and this matters. There is no E-E-A-T score in the algorithm. It is the framework Google's human quality raters use to judge search results, and those judgements are used to train and evaluate ranking systems. So it describes what Google is aiming at rather than a dial it turns — which is why you cannot optimise for it directly, only earn it.

What does the extra E stand for?

Experience, added in December 2022 to the original E-A-T. It asks whether the writer has actually done the thing — used the product, visited the place, run the process. It was largely a response to fluent content written by people with no first-hand exposure to the subject, which is now easy to produce at scale.

What is YMYL?

Your Money or Your Life — topics that could affect someone's health, financial stability, safety or wellbeing. Google holds these to a much higher standard because bad advice does real damage. Medical, legal, financial and safety content is judged far more harshly than a recipe blog.

Does an author bio really make a difference?

On its own, no. A bio that establishes who wrote something and why they are credible, linked to a real profile elsewhere and consistent across the web, is one signal among many. A stock photo and two lines of invented credentials is not — and is easy to spot.

How does E-E-A-T apply to a small local business?

More simply than people expect. Be a real, identifiable business with a real address, real reviews, real photos and a real person's name on the content. Most small businesses fail this by being anonymous, not by being unqualified.