Short answer
E-E-A-T is the framework in Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines used to judge content quality: demonstrated first-hand Experience, subject Expertise, recognised Authoritativeness, and Trust. It is not a score in the ranking system — it describes what human raters assess when evaluating whether results meet the intended quality bar.
Also called: EEAT, E-A-T
Because it is guidance for raters rather than a measurable input, E-E-A-T cannot be optimised directly. What it does is name the signals that distinguish content written by someone who has done the work from content assembled from other pages: named authors with verifiable backgrounds, first-hand specifics, transparent sourcing, and an organisation identifiable behind the site.
Trust is described as the most important of the four. For a service business the concrete expressions are mundane and checkable — a real address, a named team, accurate claims, and outcomes that can be corroborated somewhere other than your own marketing.
Common questions
Is E-E-A-T a ranking factor?
No. It is a framework in the quality rater guidelines, and raters do not directly change rankings. Their assessments inform how ranking systems are evaluated and tuned, so the signals E-E-A-T describes matter — but there is no E-E-A-T score to optimise.
Related terms
Entity SEO
Entity SEO is the practice of making a search engine resolve a business, person or product as one distinct thing rather than a set of unconnected mentions.
Structured Data (Schema Markup)
Structured data is machine-readable markup, usually JSON-LD following the schema.org vocabulary, that states explicitly what a page is about: that this string is a price, that one an opening time, this entity the organisation publishing the page.
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
Answer engine optimization is the practice of structuring content so that AI answer engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot, Google AI Overviews — cite it inside their generated answers.
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