What is E-E-A-T?
E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness — the framework from Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines for judging whether content deserves to rank, and increasingly, whether AI answer engines consider it safe to cite. It is demonstrated on the page, not asserted: bylines, credentials, first-hand evidence, citations, and a resolvable organization behind the site.
The four pillars ask different questions. Experience: has the author actually done the thing — used the product, run the migration, treated the condition? Expertise: do they have the knowledge or credentials the topic demands? Authoritativeness: do others — links, mentions, profiles — corroborate this source as a reference? Trustworthiness, the pillar Google calls most important: is the site accurate, honest about who is behind it, secure, and free of deceptive patterns?
Answer engines inherit this calculus with higher stakes: an assistant that quotes you is vouching for you in its own voice, so it prefers sources whose authorship and identity it can verify mechanically — Person and Organization structured data, consistent entity details across pages, an about page, contactability, and citations to primary sources.
E-E-A-T is not a score Google publishes; it is a rubric their raters apply and their systems approximate. You can, however, audit the on-page signals that feed it — which is what the toolkit’s E-E-A-T scanner does across all four pillars.
Common questions
What is a good E-E-A-T score?
In the toolkit’s scanner, aim for 80+ overall with no empty pillar. A high average hiding a zero — strong expertise signals but no trust page, say — reads worse to engines than a balanced profile, because the missing pillar is exactly the check they cannot corroborate.