What E-E-A-T means, how Google uses it, and what it is not

E-E-A-T is short for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. Google uses the term for the aspects of content that its automated systems try to recognize once they have found pages that are relevant to a search.

The four are not equal. Google says trust is the most important, and that the other three feed into it. A page does not need all of them. A first-hand account can be helpful because of the experience it shows, while a technical explainer can be helpful because of the expertise behind it.

No, not directly. Google's own wording is that E-E-A-T itself is not a specific ranking factor. Its systems instead use a mix of factors that can identify content with good E-E-A-T.

The weighting changes with the topic. For subjects that could significantly affect someone's health, financial stability or safety, or the welfare of society, Google gives even more weight to content that shows strong E-E-A-T. It calls these Your Money or Your Life topics, or YMYL. On those pages, Google says content must be highly accurate and consistent with established expert consensus.

Google uses search quality raters, people who are trained to judge whether content has strong E-E-A-T using the search quality rater guidelines. Their ratings do not move any page. Google says raters have no control over rankings and that rater data is not used directly in its ranking algorithms. The ratings tell Google whether its systems seem to be working, in the way a restaurant reads feedback cards from diners.

When raters look at a page's main content, they consider four things: effort, originality, talent or skill, and accuracy. Google lists automatically generating pages from feeds, or producing large amounts of text with generative AI and no manual oversight, as examples of little to no effort. Crediting other sources does not make up for missing original work.

Google suggests checking content against three questions.

Who made it: is the author obvious, is there a byline where readers would expect one, and does it lead to background on the author? How was it made: for a product review, that could mean how many products were tested and how, and for automated or AI-assisted content, a disclosure of how automation was used. Why was it made: the answer should be to help people who come to the site directly, not to attract search visits.

Google calls Why perhaps the most important of the three. It also warns against faking the Who. Made-up names, AI-generated headshots and false credentials are, in its words, a form of deception, and any deception makes a page untrustworthy to users and to its automated quality systems.