E-E-A-T SEO: What Google Expects From an Article's Author

E-E-A-T comes from the Search Quality Rater Guidelines — the document Google's human raters use when they judge the quality of search results. It stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust. The first E was added in December 2022; before that it was just E-A-T.

The awkward part first: E-E-A-T is not a ranking factor. There is no variable in the algorithm that reads "E-E-A-T = 7.3". It is a description of what a good result should look like, and the algorithm approximates it through a lot of other signals. So you cannot configure it, and you cannot tick it off in an audit.

What you can do is remove most of the reasons a reader — or a rater — would find your article untrustworthy. That part is concrete work.

What the four letters mean in practice

Experience. Did you actually hold the thing? Did you do the procedure, cook the recipe, install the product? An article about replacing a gasket, written by someone who has replaced one, reads differently from a rewrite of three other articles. It shows up in details you cannot google: what went wrong, how long it took, what you did differently the second time.

Expertise. Formal and informal. For tax advice, qualifications and a licence are expected. For a lawnmower review, three seasons of mowing with it is enough. Google's own guidance explicitly allows for "everyday expertise" — experience without a diploma.

Authoritativeness. Is your site or author a reference point for the topic? Do others mention you, link to you, quote you? This is the slowest part to build, and the one you cannot fix by editing a template.

Trust. Google calls this the most important component; the other three only support it. It covers accurate identification of who runs the business, a contact, returns and complaints terms, secure transmission, no misleading claims. A site with no company registration details and no phone number has no trust, no matter how good the text is.

YMYL: when the bar is higher

YMYL stands for Your Money or Your Life — topics where bad advice can damage someone's health, finances, safety or legal position. Finance, medicine, law, nutrition, parenting. Authorship and verifiability are judged hardest here.

If you sell building materials or write about gardening, you are not in YMYL and you do not need to document certifications. If you write about loans or medication, an anonymous article with no named author is a problem in itself.

What to add to the article page

This is the part you can finish in one afternoon.

1. A real author name, not "Admin" or "Editorial team". An actual person with a surname.
2. A short bio under the article. Three to five sentences: what they do, how long they have done it, why they write about this topic. No titles they do not hold.
3. A separate author page listing their articles, with a link to LinkedIn or a professional profile.
4. Publication date and last-updated date. Both visible. Only show an update date when you genuinely changed the text — a rewritten date with unchanged content improves nothing.
5. Links to the sources your numbers come from. To the original source, not to an article quoting it.
6. An About page with names, address, company registration number and a contact somebody answers.
7. Clear separation of ads and affiliate links from editorial text.

What not to do: invented authors with stock photos, inflated bios along the lines of "leading expert in…", credentials with nothing behind them. Google may not catch it immediately. Readers do, and so do competitors.

The technical part: author and organisation schema

Structured data does not replace content, but it makes the link between article, author and company unambiguous.

• Article with author filled in as a Person (not just a text string) and publisher as an Organization.
• On Person, add url pointing to the author page and sameAs for profiles belonging to the same person.
• On Organization, add the logo, address, contact and sameAs for company profiles.

A common mistake: author set to the company name while the type is Person, or schema copied from another page so every article shares one author and one date. If you want to check whether yours holds up, these inconsistencies are exactly what shows up most often in broken JSON-LD.

AI-written text and E-E-A-T

Google has never cared whether a human or a machine typed the words. It cared whether the text is useful. In March 2024 a rule against scaled content abuse was added — mass production of content with no added value, regardless of how it was produced.

In practice: a machine-written article that paraphrases the top three results is weak. The same article with your specific case, your numbers and your experience added is not.

That is how I work too. I take topics from Search Console data — queries a site already appears for but has no page covering. I write the draft, and you approve it before it goes live. That approval is not a formality: it is where you add the experience I cannot read out of public data — actual prices, the complications your customers typically run into, what you really recommend.

I will say plainly what the tool does not know: it has never seen your workshop, it does not see your warranty claims, and it does not know what customers tell you at handover. Those sentences have to come from you. They are also the only sentences in the article a competitor cannot copy.

Strengthening experience when you are not a media brand

A small business has one advantage over a large portal: it does the work every day. Use it.

• Use numbers from your own practice: how many jobs a year, what the usual scope is, what the most common repair costs.
• State the limits. "This does not make sense if you have fewer than X." Text that talks someone out of something reads as more credible than text that recommends everything.
• Use your own photos, not stock. A picture from your premises is evidence of experience. Images also need alt text — without it Google has no idea what is in the photo.
• Name the mistakes you made. Nobody else has that content.

Old content as a trust risk

An article with outdated prices, repealed legislation or a product you no longer sell undermines trust in the whole site. So in an audit I do not only look at new texts, but also at the ones that dropped. Rewriting an old page is often faster and more effective than writing a new one.

A five-minute checklist

Open any article on your site and answer:

• Is there a named person under it?
• Does the bio tell the reader why that person is worth believing?
• Is the last-updated date visible?
• Are the numbers in the text backed by a link or by your own experience?
• Can a reader find out within two clicks who runs the site and how to reach them?
• Does the article contain at least one sentence nobody else would have written?

Every "no" is a concrete task. Not a strategy — a task for today.

What to realistically expect

E-E-A-T is not a switch. Adding an author box will not lift your rankings over the weekend. Positions move slowly, and anyone promising otherwise is lying to you. What you can measure is the effect of individual changes over time: 28 days before a change compared with 28 days after it, on the affected URLs only.

And if you are deciding how much content you need in the first place, settle that before you start churning out posts. With E-E-A-T, five articles with a signature and real experience do more than thirty anonymous ones.