E-E-A-T
E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness — a framework from Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines used to evaluate content and site quality, especially for topics that affect a person's health, finances, or safety.
Updated
November 12, 2026
Category
SEO Glossary
E-E-A-T isn't a single, directly measurable ranking factor or score Google computes and applies; it's a framework human quality raters use to evaluate search results as part of the process that helps validate and tune Google's actual ranking algorithms. The 'Experience' component was added in 2022 to specifically recognize content written by someone with first-hand experience of a topic (a real product review from someone who used it) as distinct from expertise alone (a professional writing about a topic without direct experience). Trustworthiness sits at the center of the framework — Google's own guidelines describe the other three as contributing to trust, which is treated as the most important of the four, especially for YMYL topics where inaccurate content carries real-world consequences.
Example
A supplement-review site adds verified author credentials, first-hand testing notes, and citations to clinical studies after a core-update traffic drop tied to weak E-E-A-T signals on its product reviews.
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