E-E-A-T

E-E-A-T is the set of four dimensions Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines use to judge page quality — Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust — with Trust as the most important of the four.

The guidelines are written for human quality raters who evaluate the quality of search results. The three E-A-T dimensions have appeared in the guidelines since 2014. The December 2022 edition added the first E, Experience, which asks whether the author has actually used the product, been to the place or lived through the situation they describe.

What each dimension looks at

• Experience. Does the author have first-hand contact with the subject? Product reviews written after real use, accounts of a medical experience and hands-on walkthroughs fall here.
• Expertise. Does the author have the relevant knowledge or credentials for the topic?
• Authoritativeness. Are the author and the site recognized as a go-to source in that field?
• Trust. Is the information accurate, are its sources transparent, and can the organization behind it be contacted and verified? The other three all serve this one.

How it relates to being cited by AI

E-E-A-T is an evaluation framework from the world of search engine optimization (SEO). But the signals it lists — named authors, organization details, sourced facts, verifiable third-party evidence — also affect whether a piece of content is treated as a credible citation source when an AI answers a question.

The overlap is practical rather than official. Nothing says an AI assistant uses Google’s rater guidelines. But a page that clearly states who wrote it, which organization stands behind it, where each fact came from and when it was last updated is easier for any system — or any human — to trust. It is also harder to confuse with a content farm.

Common misunderstandings

• It is not a score. There is no E-E-A-T number you can look up, no API that reports it, and no tag that raises it.
• Raters don’t rank pages. Rater scores are used to evaluate how well Google’s algorithms are working. They do not directly change the ranking of any particular page.
• It is not a checklist you can game. Adding an “expert reviewed” badge without a real, traceable expert behind it does nothing useful.

What you can actually do

The things that translate into action are straightforward:

• Name the author and link to a page that shows their background.
• Identify the organization — legal name, location, contact details — ideally on a clear entity page (see brand entity).
• Source your data. Every number should say where it came from.
• Show the update date, and actually update pages when facts change.
• Link to third-party evidence rather than just claiming it: the article, the directory listing, the certification page.

These are the same basics that matter for generative engine optimization (GEO). In both cases, the goal is the same: make it easy for a machine to verify that what you say is true and that you are who you say you are.