Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness: the qualities Google's rater guidelines use to judge whether content and its author can be relied on.
E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, the qualities Google's search quality rater guidelines use to judge whether content and its author can be relied on. It is not a direct ranking score but a framework raters apply, and one search systems approximate through other signals. Trust is the centre of it; the other three feed into it.
Experience is first-hand involvement, having used the product or visited the place; expertise is genuine subject knowledge; authoritativeness is reputation as a go-to source; trustworthiness is accuracy, honesty, and safety. The bar rises for money-or-health topics, where weak trust does the most harm.
For AI, E-E-A-T maps onto why a system relies on some sources over others. The same signals that build source authority and brand authority, demonstrated expertise, corroboration, and a track record, are what make a page more likely to be trusted, retrieved, and cited in an answer. First-hand experience and original findings also lift information gain, the new information that earns a place in AI visibility.
