What is E-E-A-T?
E-E-A-T is shorthand for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. It comes from Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines, the document used by thousands of contract raters who evaluate sample search results. Their ratings do not change rankings directly; Google uses them to test whether changes to its ranking systems are producing better results.
So E-E-A-T is not a score, a signal, or something you can add to a page. It describes the qualities Google's systems are designed to reward. Google added the first "E", Experience, in December 2022, recognizing that first-hand use of a product or place can matter as much as formal expertise.
How it works
The four parts:
- Experience: has the creator actually done the thing? A review written by someone who used the product, with their own photos and findings.
- Expertise: does the creator have the knowledge or skill the topic requires?
- Authoritativeness: is the creator or site a recognized source on this topic?
- Trustworthiness: is the page accurate, honest, and safe? The guidelines call trust the most important of the four; the others support it.
How much E-E-A-T a page needs depends on the stakes. The guidelines single out Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) topics, such as health, finance, safety, and civic information, where poor content can cause real harm. A hobby blog post about latte art needs far less formal expertise than an article about medication doses.
Example
Two articles on choosing an espresso machine:
- One lists specs copied from manufacturer pages and ends with affiliate links. No author, no photos, no testing.
- The other is written by a named barista with a linked bio, describes six weeks of daily use of each machine, includes original photos and shot timings, and discloses affiliate relationships.
The second shows experience, expertise, and trust in ways a reader, and a rater, can see.
In WordPress
Practical signals you can show on a WordPress site: real author profiles with bios and links (WordPress author archives and user profiles support this), an About page that explains who runs the site, clear contact details, citations to sources, update dates on revised content, and transparent affiliate disclosures. Article structured data can name the author in machine-readable form, and Hydrogen SEO's Article schema includes an author field; see the schema types reference.
Common mistakes
- Treating E-E-A-T as a checklist of author boxes and badges without improving the content.
- Inventing credentials or fake author personas.
- Claiming E-E-A-T is a ranking factor that can be measured with a tool. No tool can see it directly.
Common questions
Is E-E-A-T a ranking factor?
Not directly. It is a framework raters use to evaluate results. Google says its ranking systems use many signals that align with what E-E-A-T describes.
What does YMYL mean?
Your Money or Your Life: topics such as health, finance, safety, and civic information, where inaccurate content could harm someone. Google holds these to a higher standard of trust.