E-E-A-T: What Google Means by It and How to Show It (With Checklist)

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust. Google uses it to describe what good content looks like, and its quality raters are trained to judge pages by it. Trust sits at the centre. The other three letters matter because they help a reader trust the page.

This guide explains each letter with Google's own words, clears up what E-E-A-T is and isn't, and ends with a checklist you can run on a page and on a whole site. A later section covers AI-assisted content, because Google's latest guidance there puts accuracy first.

What does E-E-A-T stand for?

The four letters come from Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines, the document it gives to the people who rate search results. Section 3.4 defines them like this:

The guidelines give a plain example for each of the first two. For Experience, they ask which you would trust: a product review from someone who has used the product or a "review" by someone who has not. For Expertise, they ask whether you would take home electrical rewiring advice from a skilled electrician or from an antique homes enthusiast with no knowledge of wiring.

For Authoritativeness, they note that most topics have no single official source. When one exists, such as the official government page for renewing a passport, it is often among the most reliable sources.

Why is Trust the most important part?

Google says so in both places that matter. The rater guidelines state that "the most important member at the center of the E-E-A-T family is Trust." Google's own page on creating helpful, people-first content says: "Of these aspects, trust is most important. The others contribute to trust, but content doesn't necessarily have to demonstrate all of them."

The guidelines also explain the ranking among the letters: "untrustworthy pages have low E-E-A-T no matter how Experienced, Expert, or Authoritative they may seem." Their example is a financial scam run by a highly experienced scammer. And they close the section with one rule: "If a page is untrustworthy for any reason, it has low E-E-A-T."

What counts as trust depends on the page. The guidelines list four cases:

• Online stores need secure payment systems and reliable customer service.
• Product reviews should be honest and written to help people make informed purchasing decisions, "rather than solely to sell the product."
• Informational pages on clear YMYL topics "must be accurate to prevent harm to people and society."
• Social media posts that only entertain may not need a high level of trust.

For a content team, the second and third cases are the daily work. Accuracy and honesty are the parts of trust you control on every page you publish.

Is E-E-A-T a ranking factor?

No single E-E-A-T score exists in Google's ranking. Google's helpful content page says: "While E-E-A-T itself isn't a specific ranking factor, using a mix of factors that can identify content with good E-E-A-T is useful."

The page also explains the role of raters. They are people who tell Google whether its systems seem to produce good results. In Google's words, "Search raters have no control over how pages rank. Rater data is not used directly in our ranking algorithms." Google compares it to feedback cards at a restaurant.

So E-E-A-T is a way of describing quality that Google's systems try to reflect. Google adds that reading the guidelines "may help you self-assess how your content is doing from an E-E-A-T perspective." That is how to use the concept: as a self-check, not as a number to chase.

Google also says its systems "give even more weight to content that aligns with strong E-E-A-T" for the topics covered in the next section.

What is YMYL?

YMYL stands for "Your Money or Your Life." The rater guidelines define it as topics that "could significantly impact the health, financial stability, or safety of people, or the welfare or well-being of society." Their examples include symptoms of a heart attack, how to invest money, what to do in an earthquake and who can vote.

For these topics, the bar is higher. Section 4.5.2 says that if a YMYL page is highly inexpert, raters should treat it as untrustworthy and give it the lowest rating. The guidelines also separate two kinds of YMYL pages. A forum thread where people describe coping with cancer treatment can be valuable because of the life experience in it. Advice on treatment options, tax forms or retirement investing is listed as "best left to Experts."

If you write about money or health, show real credentials and cite primary sources. If you write about a hobby, the bar is lower, but the same questions apply.

When did Google add the second E?

Google announced it on December 15, 2022, in a Search Central blog post titled "E-A-T gets an extra E for Experience." The post says: "E-A-T is gaining an E: experience." It describes the question raters now ask: does the content show it "was produced with some degree of experience, such as with actual use of a product, having actually visited a place or communicating what a person experienced?"

Google framed this as a refinement. The post says "these are not fundamentally new ideas" and repeats that the guidelines "don't directly influence ranking."

How do raters judge E-E-A-T?

Raters do not take a site's word for itself. The guidelines tell them to use up to three kinds of evidence:

1. What the site or creator says about themselves. The "About us" page or the creator's profile is the starting point.
2. What others say about them. Raters look for "independent reviews, references, news articles, and other sources of credible information."
3. What is visible on the page. For some pages, experience and expertise show in the content itself.

The guidelines also warn about conflicts of interest. Reviews by people who own the product and share their experience "can be very valuable and trustworthy," while "reviews" by the manufacturer or by a paid influencer "are not as trustworthy due to the conflict of interest."

The second kind of evidence is the one you can't write yourself. It is earned, which is why site-level items appear in the checklist below.

How do you show E-E-A-T? A checklist

Google gives no official checklist. The items below come from the rater guidelines and from Google's "Who, How and Why" questions on its helpful content page. Where we've added practical advice of our own, we say so.

Page-level checklist

Trust (accuracy and honesty)

• Every figure, price, date, name and rule in the text matches a primary source. For prices, check the vendor's own pricing page on the day you publish.
• Sources are linked on the words they support, so a reader can check the claim in one click.
• The title and meta description say what the page says. Google's AI guidance asks for review of <title> and meta description elements too.
• The page shows when it was published and last updated, and you update it when the facts change. This is our advice, not a stated Google requirement.
• The page exists to help the reader. Google calls "why" "perhaps the most important question to answer about your content."

Who wrote it

• A byline appears where readers would expect one, and it links to a page about the author and the areas they write about.
• The author is real. Google calls fabricated creator profiles, "such as by using AI-generated headshots, made-up names, or false credentials," a form of deception that makes a page "untrustworthy to both users and our automated quality systems."
• On YMYL topics, the author or reviewer has credentials that fit the topic, and the page says what they are.

Experience and expertise

• The page contains detail that only someone with first-hand use could write: your own photos, screenshots, measurements, results and mistakes.
• Reviews and tests say how many products were tested, what the results were and how the tests were run. Google names these as ways to "build trust with readers," ideally with evidence such as photographs.
• You say where you have a financial interest, such as affiliate links or a sponsored product. The rater guidelines treat conflicts of interest as a reason to trust a source less.

How it was made

• If automation or AI produced a substantial part of the content, the page says so where readers would reasonably expect it, and says how it was used.

Site-level checklist

• An About page says who is responsible for the site. The guidelines say it should be clear who is responsible for the website and who created the content on each page.
• Contact details are easy to find. For stores, banks and other sites that handle money, the guidelines call contact and customer service information "extremely important."
• Author pages exist and say something checkable: past work, credentials, links to where the person publishes elsewhere.
• Independent sources say good things about you. Look at what reviews, news articles and references say about your brand and authors, since raters look for exactly that. You can't write these yourself, so earn them with work worth citing.
• Shops have secure payment and clear policies on returns and exchanges.
• Old pages with wrong facts are updated or removed. A site full of outdated claims is hard to trust. This is our advice, not a stated Google requirement.

What does Experience look like on a page?

Compare two sentences about the same software tool. "Users love the interface" could come from anywhere. A sentence such as "I exported a 500 MB project and it took longer than the tool's help page says" could only come from someone who ran the export. It also gives the reader something to check.

Google's own example is the product review, so reviews are where first-hand detail pays off most. For the full method, see our guide to writing product reviews.

E-E-A-T and AI-assisted content

Google does not ban AI content. Its guidance on generative AI says generative AI "can be particularly useful when researching a topic, and to add structure to original content." The rater guidelines say the same in different words: "Generative AI tools may be used for high quality and low quality content creation."

What matters is what you do with it. Four points follow from the sources above.

Experience has to come from a person. A model has not used the product, visited the place or run the test. Google's definition of Experience is first-hand or life experience, so the sentences that carry it need to come from someone who has it. Add them yourself, from real use.

Accuracy is the part to check. Google's guidance explains why: "generative models don't retrieve facts, but predict a likely sequence of words based on their training data," so output "may contain inaccuracies (also known as hallucinations)." It then adds: "It is critical to manually factcheck and review all AI-generated content for accuracy and trustworthiness before publishing." The page was last updated on October 1, 2026. The review also covers the title, meta description, structured data and image alt text.

This reaches beyond AI-written text. Accuracy is the core of Trust for every article, whoever wrote it. In a test we ran in October 2026 on 28 articles from Google's first page, 19 of the 28 articles we checked had at least one verified error. The errors clustered where facts had changed recently, such as prices, fees and tax rules.

Say how the content was made. Google's "How" question asks whether the use of AI is "self-evident to visitors through disclosures or in other ways." The generative AI page makes the same point: sharing how content was created "can help give your readers more context."

Don't invent authors. An AI-written article with a fake expert byline fails the Trust test in the most direct way Google describes.

Scale also matters. Google's AI page warns that using generative tools "to generate many pages without adding value for users may violate Google's spam policy on scaled content abuse."

How ProofWrite fits

ProofWrite is an AI writer built around the Trust part of this list. It reads sources before it plans the article, so claims trace back to pages a reader can open. Each factual sentence gets a verdict, and sources are linked at the claims they support. The title and description are checked too, and you settle what is still open and sign off the version you publish.

ProofWrite can't supply the Experience part. For that it has a field for your own first-hand notes, and the writing is better when you use it. Your byline, credentials and reputation are also yours to build.

FAQ

Is there an E-E-A-T score I can measure?

Google doesn't publish one. It says E-E-A-T "itself isn't a specific ranking factor." Any score from a third-party tool is that tool's own estimate. A better test is to go through the checklist above, or to ask a colleague who doesn't know the topic whether they would trust the page and why.

Does E-E-A-T only matter for YMYL topics?

It applies to every page the raters judge, but the bar rises with the potential for harm. Google says its systems "give even more weight" to strong E-E-A-T for YMYL topics. A page about a board game needs less proof of credentials than a page about retirement investing.

Does a page need all four letters?

No. Google says content "doesn't necessarily have to demonstrate all of them" and gives the example that some content is helpful because of experience while other content is helpful because of expertise. The rater guidelines say different combinations "may be relevant to different topics." Trust is the one every page needs.

Does AI-generated content hurt E-E-A-T?

Google's guidance doesn't say that. It says generative AI can be a useful tool and that AI content must be fact-checked and reviewed before publishing. The risks are inaccuracy, a lack of real experience and mass-producing pages with no added value.

Can a new site or a small author show E-E-A-T?

Yes. The guidelines say many types of pages "are trustworthy and achieve their purpose well when created by people with a wealth of personal experience." A new author can start with first-hand detail, a real byline, honest sourcing and a clear About page, and build outside reputation over time.

Check the claims on your pages

E-E-A-T is a judgment about whether readers can trust a page. The most concrete part you control is whether each claim on it is true and sourced. If you want to know where your existing pages stand, check the articles you already published.

Check 3 articles free →

Sources

• Google, Search Quality Rater Guidelines, version dated September 11, 2025 (sections 2.3, 2.5.2, 2.5.3, 3.3.1, 3.4, 3.4.1, 4.5.2)
• Google Search Central, Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content, last updated October 5, 2026
• Google Search Central, Google Search's guidance on using generative AI content on your website, last updated October 1, 2026
• Google Search Central Blog, Our latest update to the quality rater guidelines: E-A-T gets an extra E for Experience, December 15, 2022
• ProofWrite, Google now calls fact-checking AI content critical. We ran an AI fact checker on 28 page-one articles