Google E-E-A-T

E-E-A-T is an acronym created by Google which stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. It is not a ranking factor but rather a component of Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines (SQEG). These comments assist its employees know as Quality Raters in the work of determining whether the search engine results are returning high quality, relevant information. While E-E-A-T should not be confused with direct ranking signals, incorporation of E-E-A-T principles into online publishing can give website owners some confidence in knowing that they are meeting Google’s stated definitions of quality and relevance.

If you read through Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines and updates from the Google Search Central blog, you can start to gather clues as to why Google emphasizes E-E-A-T signals (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) and how they define them. We’ll offer a summary of each of the four E-E-A-T factors here and tips on how to be sure you’re taking them into consideration in what you publish online.

On August 1st, 2018 Google rolled out a Core Update to its algorithm that ended up having a major ranking impact on a large number of sites, including many top brands. Glenn Gabe documented the impact at the time.

When the dust settled SEOs noticed was a meaningful shift towards content that demonstrated higher expertise, authority and trust: E-A-T, as it was then called.

The additional E for experience, was added in late 2022 to fully flesh out the concept of 'expertise' to include first-hand experience, completing the E-E-A-T acronym.

When it comes to evaluating experience, Google instructs its Quality Rater staff to identify whether content is based on first-hand experience with the subject being covered. For example, has a reviewer personally transacted with a business they’re writing about? Has a retailer or influencer personally used the products they are recommending? Has a writer personally visited the places they are featuring?

Demonstrating these real-life experiences will require a different approach for each niche, but one of the most obvious examples that is applicable to most enterprises surrounds reviews of both businesses and products. Very often, searchers are looking for proofs of the experiences of other people with your brand, instead of what your brand might say about itself or its products. In fact, in a large-scale survey, Moz found that only 14% of consumers trust what brands say about themselves as much as they trust user reviews.

Given this, showcasing the sentiment of your customers and clients on your website can be a smart way to incorporate the Experience factor into your publication, provided that you are validating that reviews stem from real patrons of your business, rather than from family, friends, or other non-customers. The review shown above even includes photos of the reviewer visiting a local place of business, adding strong credibility to the proposition that they have genuine experience with the entity they are writing about.

Meanwhile, enterprises that re-sell or recommend the products and services of other manufacturers and providers could personally trial those offerings. For example, if a grocery store is recommending three different brands of apple juice, it might hold a customer taste test and publish its findings, using the data collected to identify what agreeable attributes each brand offers, such as price, quality, quantity, taste, provenance, ecological status, and other factors. Your publication might film a video of your ownership and staff trying the products and talking about them to prove that you are speaking from real experience when you recommend these products as being great.

Finally, if your business model depends, in part, on providing information about places, you might prove that you’ve been to them with first-hand travel accounts, photos, and videos. For example, realty and travel websites frequently publish content about neighborhoods, schools, local business scenes, amenities, hospitality offerings, towns, and cities. Sometimes, shortcuts are taken by simply scraping and spinning content about these locales from sites like Wikipedia, missing the opportunity to prove first-hand experiences. If a writer is publishing a guide to the ten best restaurants in Portland, they could prove that they have actually eaten in these places by including original photos (not stock images) of their visits, images of receipts, and detailed accounts of the dishes they most enjoy at each establishment.

Google’s Quality Raters are instructed to determine the level of expertise that exists behind content, based in part on how much that content might impact a reader’s life. If your enterprise operates in medical, legal, journalistic, safety, or governmental sectors, commonly known as your-money-or-your-life (YMYL) you will need to provide official proofs of expertise. However, even if your website covers topics of lesser impact, you should still strive to demonstrate how and why you are an expert in your field.

In your-money-or-your-life (YMYL) categories, your website may well need to provide proof of licenses, professional associations, and degrees to prove to Google and the public that you are, indeed, an expert. For example, licensed marriage and family therapist websites should always show the license number of the practitioner. And, clearly, there’s a big difference between a hobby blogger groaning about income tax and a licensed CPA explaining how to file your taxes. Credentials can help the Quality Raters immediately identify the difference between the two.

While typically the term “expertise” can conjure up thoughts of academic degrees, professional accreditations, and official licenses, and while Google’s concept incorporates all these elements, it also goes beyond them to include practical, everyday expertise. An online quilt shop owner doesn’t have a degree in quilting, but her video content demonstrates that she possesses the necessary technical skills to teach others how to create complex craft projects.

For non-YMYL categories, how-to content, before-and-after completed project content, and the results of original hands-on studies can all help demonstrate your expertise. For example, a do-it-yourself lifestyle writer can showcase their expertise by blogging or vlogging about their journey to save money by replacing brand name household cleaning products with homemade recipes. They can document each step of their process and show the results, proving that they have earned enough skill through doing so to share what you know with others.

Whereas expertise involves proving yourself to be an expert in your field, authoritativeness depends largely on others recognizing you as an expert. Much of this is based on the number and quality of third-party websites that link to or cite your web pages or brand information.

For example, if we make use of a tool like Moz Link Explorer, shown above, we can enter the URL of a business like this online retailer of native UK wildflower seeds. The tool then shows us information about which sites and pages are linking to the domain we’ve entered:

We can see that the wildflower seed company has earned some excellent links from publishers like The Guardian, with its massive Domain Authority (DA) of 95 out of 100, and from other good sites like CountryLiving.com and the Wildlife Trusts with their respective Domain Authorities of 83 and 67. Domain Authority should not be confused with Google’s E-E-A-T concept of authority. Domain Authority is a proprietary Moz metric used to predict how likely a web page is to rank in search engine results, based on a variety of factors, but like Google’s E-E-A-T, it depends largely on the number and quality of links that web page has earned. The tool also shows the similar Page Authority (PA) metric for each entry, which measures the strength of a page rather than of a whole domain.

Using tools like these, your enterprise can investigate the links you have earned and, also, the links your competitors have earned that may be contributing to how much authority an organization is building up in the eyes of Google and its Quality Raters. When we click on the first link in the above screenshot, we can validate that the wildflower seller is, indeed, being linked to in a Guardian article listing out interesting Christmas gifts:

If the wildflower seller were our competitor, this process would give us a clue that we, too, might want to seek to earn a link from this influential publication with its large readership, high DA, and recognized authority. Learn more about the art of earning links in The Beginner’s Guide to Link Building.

Additionally, it’s important to know that while earning links from respected publications can contribute to Google’s impression of your authority, you can also accrue authority from publications merely citing your enterprise, even without linking to it. If a well-known, well-ranked news site, blog, website, or other online resource mentions your brand name, people in your organization, or information about your physical location such as contact information, it can be seen as a recognition of your expertise and contribute to Google’s picture of your authority.

Here, for example, is an article in the San Francisco Chronicle about historically popular dining spots which cites a local restaurant called The Slanted Door without linking to it, and it’s good to know that such references can still boost authority:

While it’s usually the ideal to earn links from sites that are authoritative and relevant to your enterprise, even citations on high-level publications can do a lot of good for Google’s sense of your authority, giving them a strong reason to return your website as a result for searchers.

This final E-E-A-T metric is one that Google has cited as being the most important of them all. Their guidelines state:

“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."

Trust, in this scenario, hinges largely on the accuracy, accessibility, and validity of the information your business publishes. For example, the Contact Us page on the website of a retail business like Costco with its multiple offers of customer support, goes far towards establishing that this is a legitimate and trustworthy business that can be readily contacted by the public. All of the following are trust factors that Google’s evaluators may take into consideration:

• Be sure your contact information is accessible and accurate, not hidden or full of errors like wrong phone numbers or fictitious addresses

• Be sure your website security and consumer protections are strong and up-to-date

• Be sure all information published is factually accurate, rather than making unsupported claims; back up all claims with supporting evidence and feel free to link out to other trusted sources

• Be sure policies like your shipping and returns policy are accurate and accessible

• Be sure you are accurately representing users’ reviews if your website publishes reviews; don’t cherry pick to show only the positive ones

• Be sure you are disclosing advertising relationships

• Be sure you aren’t hiding your content behind too many ads, popups, or other elements that create a poor user experience on your website

• Be sure that if you are marketing a local business, the sentiment of the reviews it is earning is overall positive and of a number that is commensurate with what other similar businesses are earning in your local market

This seems like a very simple question, but the answer is complex and a cause of controversy in the SEO community. As Cyrus Shepard clarified in a Whiteboard Friday video:

“There are very smart SEOs on both sides of the debate. Some SEOs dismiss E-A-T. Others embrace it fully. Even Googlers have different opinions about how it should be communicated.”

Cyrus Shepard goes on to explain that there are roughly three schools of thought on this topic of whether E-E-A-T factors should be called search ranking factors:

1. School of thought #1 says that anything called a ranking factor should demonstrably and directly impact rankings and be measurable. For example, if you re-optimize the URL of a page on your website and it moves up ten spots in Google’s rankings, you can form a strong hypothesis from this measurement that your action directly impacted your positioning in the SERPs. Because some E-E-A-T signals are hard to measure and quantify, one stance is that these elements should not really called ranking factors.

2. School of thought #2 says that Google’s algorithm is too complex for us to pin down direct ranking factors with total certainty, and that, instead, we should look at which behaviors appear to be rewarded during times of updates like the 2012 Panda update. At the risk of oversimplifying, Panda used machine learning to identify sites with favorable characteristics like being trustworthy enough to merit being given your credit card. In this scenario, E-E-A-T looks very much like something that is impacting rankings.

3. School of thought #3 says any quality or action that might increase rankings should be considered a ranking factor, whether or not it is actually used in Google’s algorithms. Shepard provides the example of social media shares. They may or may not be part of Google’s secret algos, but they can certainly lead to links, which can then improve rankings.

In sum, there isn’t agreement about the exact role of E-E-A-T in rankings. Your safest bet is to remember that these are signals Google instructs its Quality Raters to evaluate in measuring SERP quality; whether or not these metrics should be labeled as “ranking factors”, there are elements of them that demonstrably impact rankings while others may be best thought of as basic best practices. Taken altogether, evaluating your own site for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness is plain good sense.

All site owners should strive to publish content that meets E-E-A-T criteria, but those in YMYL categories have a particular responsibility to ensure that they meet E-E-A-T’s basic principles. It stands to reason that the public has a greater need for qualities like factual accuracy and security when they are looking at financial investment or medical information than they might if they are looking at photos of cats.

We recommend that YMYL organizations watch Lily Ray’s video which covers the incorporation of experts into your publishing strategy. We also recommend reading Rebecca Moss’ article on how to use digital PR to improve your E-E-A-T signals.

Yes! Bearing in mind that some studies date to before Google added the newer “E” for experience to expand their set of E-E-A-T principles in 2022, here is a short list of good studies you can read to learn more about this topic:

• 5 Things I Learned About E-A-T by Analyzing 647 Search Results

• Impact of authorship content on E-A-T signals

• What Does It Mean to Have Good E-A-T?

• How a Medical EAT SEO Strategy Increased Organic Revenue by 300%

At the time of publishing this guide to understanding E-E-A-T, the internet is in a significant state of transition due to the introduction and promotion of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. Experimental applications like Google Bard, Google SGE, Chat GPT, OpenAI, and the new Bing are all vying for attention as the “next big thing” on the web. Because many of these offerings have the capacity to generate large volumes of content on demand, publishers are wise to consider where this option stands in relationship and opposition to E-E-A-T principles. Let’s examine them again, in the light of auto-generated digital content:

1) Can AI prove experience?

Probably not. A robot cannot prove that it has first-hand experience of real life. It cannot possess the human feelings necessary for the evaluation of human experiences. AI can only imitate humans. Unfortunately, AI has been caught generating “hallucinations”, as in this case of Google’s Bard falsely claiming to have spoken with people eating at Mexican restaurants. While AI can generate the appearance of experience, it cannot have actual experiences.

2) Can AI prove expertise?

Probably not. While a chat bot may seem like an expert and generate all kinds of advice for you, this is because it has been trained to do so, not because it is intelligent and has earned degrees or practical expertise from life. AI should never be seen as a replacement for the human experts in your organization, and scandals are already rife, as in the case of a lawyer using ChatGPT to generate fake court citations. YMYL category organizations should be especially careful about the use of AI to generate any type of content seen by the public and should be rigorously fact-checking all information published.

3) Can AI prove authoritativeness?

This is unexplored territory. Bearing in mind that the authoritativeness factor of E-E-A-T largely hinges on third parties recognizing you as an expert, the truth is that we don’t yet know if being cited within AI results like Google’s SGE will pass any type of authority to the recipient. When a famous food critic cites or links to their favorite Italian cuisine chef or Thai restaurant in Seattle, they are recognizing the expertise of those sources. No one knows yet if AI returning entities as results will be seen as a vote for their expertise and, meanwhile, the concept of recognizing artificial intelligence, itself, as an expert source is quite problematic, given that it is simply an amalgam of training data and prone to error.

4) Can AI prove trustworthiness?

Probably not. In fact, even those sources trying to find a way to make AI fit into Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines urge publishers to disclose when AI has been used to generate any type of content, due to trust issues. Many SEOs are deeply concerned that AI will lead to the web being polluted with low quality content and a loss of public trust in the search engine results. Bearing in mind that Google calls trustworthiness the most important E-E-A-T factor, the burden is on publishers to be rigorous in providing a factual, accurate, positive user experience on their sites, despite the temptation of using automation as a shortcut.

The truth is that Google is now in a curious position. For decades, it has urged humans to create content for humans and to harness expertise within their organizations to share out the best they have to offer the world. Google has long trained its Quality Raters to value human experience, human expertise, human authoritativeness, and human trustworthiness.

Now, Google is participating in the AI race, offering publishers the chance to automate the generation of content instead of crafting it from a deep place of human knowledge. It's an odd and uncomfortable dichotomy which is causing Google to struggle to strike a balanced pose between automation and human intelligence. Simultaneously, governmental bodies are scrambling to develop legislation surrounding the use of this market-disrupting technology.

For now, here’s a summary of Google’s current position on AI at the time of the publication of this guide:

• Use of AI is not prohibited by Google so long as it isn’t being used to manipulate search engine rankings.

• Google notes that automation has long been a part of online publishing and calls AI a “new and exciting” assistant for generating useful content.

• Google expresses unconcern regarding AI-generated content polluting the web with low-quality and factually incorrect information because it is confident in its skills to demote this type of content in favor of content it sees as high-quality. It’s important to note that many SEOs would disagree with Google’s self-assessment of its ability to weed out spam and deliver high-quality, trustworthy SERPs.

• Google does not currently require publishers to disclose the presence of AI-generated content, instead saying that it could be “useful” to disclose this.

• Google’s overall position is that they want to continue rewarding high-quality content, regardless of how it is generated.

Word to the wise: while Google’s present position may seem like an endorsement for publishers to wholeheartedly embrace AI-generated content, go carefully with this. It’s vital to remember that as the creators of Bard and SGE, Google now has horses in this race and is not unbiased. What Google says today does not prevent them from changing positions later and deciding to target practices with future updates and penalties.

Meanwhile, governmental organizations are still in the decision-making process regarding AI. Italy and Syria, for example, are among many countries that have banned ChatGPT, and it’s anyone’s guess where this debate will finally land throughout all the world’s nations. Smart organizations will be experimenting with the varied use cases of AI at this stage, but will also continue to carefully cultivate and promote the human expertise within their spheres.

Finally, publishers should familiarize themselves with the 2022 Helpful Content Update (HCU). While SEOs strive to pin down the exact impacts of this ongoing algorithmic update, Google gave this summary of the purpose of the initiative:

One of the most interesting aspects of this update is that, instead of focusing on single pieces of content, it's meant to evaluate whether sites have an overall pattern of publishing helpful, useful content. It is a site-wide signal. And, familiarly, it highly emphasizes a people-first approach to content publication, stating:

“People-first content creators focus first on creating satisfying content, while also utilizing SEO best practices to bring searchers additional value.”

Google recommends that publishers establish whether:

• Their site has a primary focus

• Their audience would find the content in question useful and fully satisfying

• The content in question demonstrates first-hand expertise and deep knowledge

This last point will sound familiar to you by now because it ties in directly with two of the aspects of E-E-A-T. First-hand experience and demonstrable expertise are clearly of importance to Google, and just a few months after the initial rollout of the Helpful Content Update (HCU), they added the “E” for experience to E-A-T to further clarify what they value about this attribute.

In the context of the HCU, E-E-A-T becomes an even better set of guidelines, because it ensures that your overall website is building out each of these desired qualities over time and creating a strong case for its place in the search engine results.

Written by Miriam Ellis. Edited by Jo Cameron. September 29,2023.