E-E-A-T

E-E-A-T is not a set of ranking factors in the way page speed or a meta tag is — it's a framework used in Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines, the document human quality raters use to evaluate search results as part of testing algorithm changes. It describes what trustworthy content and trustworthy creators look like: Experience (has the author actually done or used the thing they're writing about), Expertise (do they demonstrably know the subject), Authoritativeness (is the site or author recognized as a go-to source by others in the field), and Trust — the component Google's own guidelines describe as the most important of the four, since even highly experienced, expert, authoritative content is worthless if it isn't trustworthy.

The extra "E" for Experience was added to the guidelines after the original E-A-T framework, specifically to address content written by someone with credentials but no first-hand experience of the actual thing being described — a distinction that matters most for topics Google classifies as "Your Money or Your Life" (YMYL): health, financial, legal, and safety content where inaccurate advice can cause real harm.

In practice, E-E-A-T signals get operationalized through concrete, checkable things: author bios with real credentials, Person and Organization structured data connecting an author to their published work across the web, consistent business information, genuine backlinks from relevant and credible sites, and content that reads as written by someone who has actually done the thing — not just researched it.