SEO glossary
E-E-A-T
E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness — the qualities Google's human quality raters are asked to judge content against.
It is not a metric and nothing computes it. The rater guidelines are used to evaluate whether Google's algorithm changes are producing better results; raters do not score your pages and their scores do not rank anything. Treating E-E-A-T as a dial to turn is the common misreading.
What it does describe is what Google is trying to reward, which makes it a useful editorial checklist. First-hand Experience — has the author actually done this. Expertise — do they know the subject. Authoritativeness — is this site a recognised place for it. Trust, which the guidelines call the most important, covering accuracy, transparency and whether the site is safe to act on.
The concrete version is dull and effective: name your authors and say what qualifies them, cite sources, date your content and update it, make contact details and ownership easy to find, and be specific about what you cannot do as well as what you can.
Common question
- Is E-E-A-T a ranking factor?
- No. It is the language Google's raters use to assess quality, which indirectly shapes what the algorithm learns to reward. There is no E-E-A-T score on your site.
Definitions are the easy part
The free plan opens every tool with 500 credits and no card, so you can see these numbers on your own site rather than in an example.
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