On this page
EEAT in SEO gets sold as a dial you can turn up, usually by an audit that ends in a score. Google has no such number for your site. It has external Search Quality Raters who compare results side by side and judge whether a page can be trusted. Their ratings do not move your page on their own. Google uses them to check whether a change to its ranking systems surfaces better pages. So the practical question is not how to optimise for E-E-A-T, but what a careful reader, human or rater, needs to see before believing you.
Experience is where small firms win
The first E arrived in December 2022: has the author actually done, used or visited the thing? A guide to IR35 written by an accountant who has handled forty contractor cases beats a polished summary of other articles. Big publishers struggle here. A ten-person firm has the projects, the cases and the photos; it just rarely puts them on the page.
Google adds that trust is the most important of the four. Experience, expertise and authority are evidence; trust is the verdict. A page full of first-hand stories that gets a tax rate wrong still fails. And the bar rises with the stakes: pages about money, health, safety or legal rights, which Google calls YMYL ("your money or your life"), are judged hardest. That covers most of what a law firm website, an accountant or a financial adviser publishes.
Three letters that carry the fourth
EExperience
- own photos
- own projects
EExpertise
- named author
- role and background
AAuthority
- links from the sector
- reviews and press
Google calls trust the most important member of the family: experience, expertise and authoritativeness are the ways to demonstrate it.
A services page, rewritten for a rater
Take a Manchester bookkeeping firm with a page called "Making Tax Digital for landlords". Here is the version we usually find, and the version that earns trust.
| Element | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Opening | "We are passionate about helping landlords" | Who must comply, from which date and above which income, in two sentences |
| Author | None | Name, role, years in practice and how many landlord returns they file |
| Evidence | A stock photo of keys | A redacted example of a quarterly update the firm filed |
| Rules | "New rules are coming" | The thresholds, with the date the page was last reviewed |
| Company | A contact form | Registered name, company number, registered office, professional body |
| Others | Nothing | Reviews with names, a mention in the trade press |
The second version is longer, but every added line answers a doubt the reader had. It is also the kind of page that AI assistants quote, because it states facts plainly; see generative engine optimisation.
Trust signals when you sell across borders
A buyer in another country checks the basics before reading a word of your copy. Several of those basics are law, not style. A UK company must show its registered name, number and office on its website; a German site needs an imprint (Impressum) under the Digitale-Dienste-Gesetz, which replaced the Telemediengesetz in May 2024; in Belgium the company number is required, as our page on company numbers on websites explains. Add a GDPR privacy policy, prices in the buyer's currency with or without VAT stated, and pages in the buyer's language rather than a machine translation; multilingual websites are a trust signal in their own right.
What it costs to show trust
Mostly hours, not budget. Company details and a proper contact page take an hour. An author line with a real name and role under every guide takes an afternoon for a whole site. A legal review of your disclosures is a one-off. Your own project photography needs a shoot day or the habit of taking three pictures on every job. The ongoing cost is upkeep: every price, threshold or rule carries the date you checked it, and someone owns the next review.
Authority is the one letter you cannot write yourself. It comes from others: trade press, a professional body, partners who link to you. Why one relevant link beats fifty bought ones is explained under backlink. Reviews help too, if you earn them; see how to get more Google reviews and why buying Google reviews backfires.
Straight answers on trust and rankings
Is E-E-A-T a ranking factor?
Not as a single factor. Google says it uses a mix of signals that line up with experience, expertise, authority and trust, such as links from reputable sites and content that turns out to be correct.
Can I use AI to write my content?
Google judges the result, not the tool. An AI draft with no first-hand experience, no named author and no fact check fails the four questions anyway. Use AI for the draft, then add your own cases and figures.
Does structured data for authors help?
Only when it describes what is visible. Author markup for someone who does not appear on the page adds nothing and can look like an attempt to game the system.