E-E-A-T in practice: authors, sources and showing real experience

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. It comes from Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines, the document Google gives to the people who evaluate search results to help it test changes to its systems. The second "E", for experience, was added in late 2022. Trust sits at the centre: the guidelines describe the other three as contributing to it.

Because the concept comes from rater guidelines, it is widely misunderstood. There is no E-E-A-T score in Google's index, and adding an author box does not raise one. What Google has said is that its ranking systems try to identify signals that align with these qualities, and that it wants to reward content that demonstrates them. The useful question for a site owner is therefore practical: what would make a careful reader trust this page, and is that visible?

The four parts, in plain terms

Part	Question a reader asks	Example of strong evidence
Experience	Has the author actually done or used this?	Photos from their own testing, specific details only a user would know, honest drawbacks
Expertise	Does the author know the subject deeply?	Relevant qualifications or professional background, accurate technical detail, correct use of terms
Authoritativeness	Is this source recognised for the topic?	Citations and mentions by others in the field, a body of work on the subject
Trustworthiness	Is this accurate, honest and safe to rely on?	Sources, clear authorship and ownership, contact details, corrections, secure checkout, no deceptive design

Different topics need different mixes. A review of a hiking backpack mostly needs experience: has the reviewer carried it for days? A page on medication interactions needs expertise and formal accountability. A small bakery's page about its sourdough needs neither credentials nor citations, just evidence that real people bake real bread there.

Showing experience

Experience is the part most sites under-use, and the one generic content cannot fake convincingly. Practical ways to show it:

• Original photos and video of the product, process or place, not stock images. Show the item in use, the mess, the measurement.
• Specifics: "after three weeks the hip belt padding compressed noticeably" says more than "durable and comfortable".
• Process: how you tested, for how long, under what conditions, what you compared it with.
• Honest negatives: what you did not like, who should not buy it, what went wrong.
• Results and numbers you measured yourself, with the method explained.

The content briefs guide includes a "what we add" section precisely to make sure this material is gathered before writing starts.

Showing expertise and authorship

Readers and search engines both benefit from knowing who wrote something and why they are qualified to.

• Bylines with real names on articles where readers would expect them.
• Author pages with a short professional biography, relevant experience, and links to the author's other work or professional profiles. Make the author page a real page, not a stub.
• Reviewer notes for specialised content: "Reviewed by [name], [relevant qualification]" works only if that review actually happened and the reviewer is real.
• Structured data: Article markup with an author that has a name and a URL to the author page; Person markup on author pages. This helps machines connect the person to the content; it does not create expertise. See structured data.

Avoid invented personas. Fake authors with stock-photo headshots and generic bios are easy for readers to spot, damage trust when discovered, and run against the spirit of everything above.

Showing trust

Trust is built from many small things, most of them unglamorous:

• Who is behind the site: an about page that says who runs it, where, and how to contact them.
• Sources: link to primary sources for facts, statistics and claims. If you cannot source a claim, consider removing it.
• Dates: published and updated dates that are honest; see refreshing old content.
• Corrections: fix errors visibly when they are pointed out.
• Commercial transparency: disclose affiliate links and sponsored content clearly, and mark paid links with rel="sponsored".
• For shops: clear prices, shipping, returns, contact details, secure checkout, real reviews.
• Page experience: no deceptive ads, no pop-ups that block the content, no misleading buttons.

YMYL topics need more

For "Your Money or Your Life" topics (health, finance, legal, safety, and some news and civic information) the bar is much higher. The rater guidelines ask for content created by people with appropriate expertise and for sites that are accountable. In practice:

• Content should be written or reviewed by qualified professionals, named and described.
• Claims should match established consensus or clearly explain where and why they differ.
• Commercial interests (a financial product you sell, a supplement you market) must not shape the advice without disclosure.
• Pages should be kept current; outdated health or tax information can do real harm.

Sites without that kind of expertise should think hard before publishing on YMYL subjects at all. A garden centre writing about which plants are toxic to pets can do it well by citing veterinary sources and keeping the advice conservative; the same garden centre giving dosage advice for a sick dog should not.

Before and after: one review page

Consider a hypothetical outdoor blog's review of a two-person tent. The original version has a stock product photo, the manufacturer's specification list rewritten in friendlier words, a pros-and-cons box that could apply to any tent, a five-star rating and an affiliate button. No author, no date, no sign that anyone pitched the tent.

The revised version is written by a named reviewer whose author page lists the long-distance trails she has walked. It opens with how the tent was tested: eleven nights over three trips, including one night of heavy rain and wind. Photos show the tent pitched on a rocky platform, condensation on the inner wall in the morning, and the packed size next to a one-litre water bottle for scale. It reports the measured packed weight against the advertised one, describes the one design flaw that annoyed her (a door zip that snags), compares the tent with the model she used before, and says who should buy something else instead. The affiliate relationship is disclosed in one plain sentence at the top.

Nothing in the second version is a trick. It is simply evidence of experience, accountability and honesty, made visible. That is what the four letters are describing, and it is also the version readers trust and buy from.

What does not work

• Adding author boxes, "expert reviewed" badges or long bios to otherwise generic content.
• Listing every credential an author has, relevant or not.
• Rewriting content in a confident tone without adding substance.
• Mass-producing pages in fields where you have no experience, then decorating them with trust signals.

These treat E-E-A-T as a checklist of signals. The guidelines describe it as a property of the content and the people behind it.

An audit you can run in an hour

1. Pick your ten most important content pages.
2. For each, ask: who wrote it, and is that visible? What first-hand evidence does it contain? Which claims are sourced?
3. Check the about page and contact details: could a stranger work out who runs the site and reach them?
4. Check author pages: real people, relevant experience, links to their other work?
5. For commercial pages: are affiliate relationships disclosed, and are policies easy to find?
6. Note the weakest pages and add them to the refresh list with specific tasks: "add test photos", "add method section", "source the three statistics".

The aim is not to tick boxes but to make each page something a sceptical reader would rely on. That is also, as far as anyone can tell from Google's public statements, what its systems are trying to find. For how this connects to brand recognition across the web and in AI assistants, see entity SEO and brand mentions.