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Term

E-E-A-T

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust — four quality criteria from Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines used to assess content and websites.

E-E-A-T — explained in more detail

The four letters stand for Experience (the author’s own first-hand experience with the topic), Expertise (subject-matter competence), Authoritativeness (authority of author and site within the topic) and Trust (trustworthiness — the central anchor that supports the other three). The concept comes from Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines, the handbook for the human quality raters who evaluate Google search results.

E-E-A-T is not a direct ranking factor but an evaluation concept: quality raters score pages with it, and Google uses those scores to calibrate algorithm updates. It is especially relevant for YMYL topics (Your Money or Your Life — health, finance, legal), where wrong content can cause real harm.

Example / context

The leading “Experience” was added in December 2022 — before that, the concept was only E-A-T. The motivation: Google wanted to reward first-hand experience more visibly, rather than purely academic summaries of other sources. In practice that means a product review by someone who demonstrably owns the product should rank better than a mere recap of third-party content.

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