What is E-E-A-T?
- E-E-A-T
- E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust, the four qualities Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines ask human raters to assess when judging a page. E-E-A-T is a framework for evaluating content quality rather than a score a system computes and applies: raters do not change rankings directly, and their judgements are used to test whether changes to the ranking systems are improvements.
01 In practice
The concept is worth taking seriously despite not being a ranking factor, because the guidelines describe what the ranking systems are being tuned to approximate. A page carrying a named author with demonstrable credentials, first-hand knowledge of the subject and references to primary sources is the shape the guidelines call good, and the systems are measured against that shape.
The first E, Experience, was added to the guidelines in December 2022 and is the easiest of the four to evidence on a page. First-hand accounts, original data, photographs of actual work and the specifics only a practitioner would include are all things a rater can see and a model can quote.
For answer engines the load-bearing part of E-E-A-T is attribution. A claim tied to a named person with a stated role can be quoted and credited by an assistant; the same claim on an anonymous page gives a model nothing to attribute, which is reason enough to pass over it in favour of a source that can be named.
02 Related terms
The terms next to this one.
The work behind it
Get quoted where the models are reading.
Placements written to be quoted, on the publications models already draw answers from.