E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. It comes from the guidelines Google gives the human raters who evaluate search quality, not from the ranking algorithm. Google says E-E-A-T itself is not a ranking factor and that rater data is not used directly in ranking. It describes what Google's systems are trying to reward, which makes it a useful checklist and a poor thing to optimise for directly.
Where it comes from
Google employs raters who assess search results against a long published guide. That guide asks them to judge whether content shows expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness; in December 2022 experience was added at the front, to distinguish someone who has actually used a product or lived a situation from someone summarising others. The raters' scores are used to evaluate changes to the algorithm, not to rank individual sites.
What Google says about ranking
Its guidance is direct: E-E-A-T is not a specific ranking factor, but Google's systems use a mix of factors that can help determine which content demonstrates those qualities. Trust is described as the most important of the four, and the weight given to all of them is highest for topics that affect health, money or safety.
What it changes in practice
Say who wrote the page and why they are qualified to. Show experience where you have it: photographs of your own work, specifics only a practitioner would know, first-hand results. Cite sources for claims. Make it easy to find out who runs the business, where, and how to contact them. Keep facts current. None of this is a trick. It is what a careful reader looks for, and Google's systems are built to approximate that reader.
What does not work
Adding an author box to content that has no author. Writing about subjects you have no experience of and asserting expertise in the byline. Schema that claims credentials the page does not show. Google's systems infer these qualities from the content and from what the rest of the web says about you; labels alone do not create them.
Sources
Where this shows up in the tracker
Every term in this glossary is something the product actually measures or acts on. Plans start at £29 a month, with rank tracking, AI visibility, the daily AI readiness scan, security and domain health, Search Console, backlinks and audits on every one of them.
Related terms
YMYL
YMYL stands for Your Money or Your Life. It is Google's term, from its quality rater guidelines, for topics that could significantly affect a person's health, financial stability or safety, or the welfare of society. Google gives more weight to signs of experience, expertise, authority and trust on these topics, which makes them harder to rank for and slower to recover on.
Helpful content update
The helpful content update was a Google ranking change first released in August 2022 that assessed whether a site's content was written primarily for people or primarily to rank, and applied a site-wide demotion where it judged the latter. The September 2023 version caused severe losses for many small publishers. In March 2024 Google folded the system into its core ranking systems, so it no longer exists as a separate signal.
Algorithm update
A core update is a broad change Google makes to its ranking systems several times a year, affecting all kinds of sites and queries at once. Google's position is that a page which drops after one is not necessarily broken; other pages are now judged to serve the query better. The right response is to wait, compare, and then assess the site honestly rather than to rush changes.
Thin content
Thin content is a page that offers a visitor little or nothing they could not get elsewhere: empty category pages, copied product descriptions, auto-generated text, a paragraph wrapped around an advert. Google has no minimum word count and says so. A short page that answers a question is not thin. A long page that says nothing is.