What Is E-E-A-T? How to Show Trust on Your Website

What does E-E-A-T stand for?

E-E-A-T comes from Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines, the handbook for the people Google pays to review search results. In December 2022 Google added a second E for Experience to the older E-A-T.

• Experience: the author has used the product, visited the place or done the task.
• Expertise: the author has the knowledge or skill the topic needs.
• Authoritativeness: other people treat the author or site as a go-to source.
• Trust: the page is accurate, honest and safe. Google calls trust the most important of the four.

Is E-E-A-T a ranking factor?

Not directly. Google's guide to creating helpful, reliable, people-first content says E-E-A-T itself is not a specific ranking factor. Raters' scores don't move any single page up or down. Google uses them to check whether its ranking systems are working. Its systems use a mix of other signals to find content that shows E-E-A-T.

The same guide says these signals matter most for "Your Money or Your Life" topics: health, money, safety and other subjects where a wrong answer can hurt someone. A recipe blog and a tax guide are both judged on trust, but the tax guide is held to a higher bar.

Does E-E-A-T matter for AI Overviews and ChatGPT?

Google says its AI features like AI Overviews follow the same SEO fundamentals as regular Search. There is no special markup to add. So the work that builds trust for Search also applies there.

For ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude, we have not seen any provider publish an E-E-A-T rule. In our experience, pages that get quoted have a clear author, specific facts and sources, which are the same things raters look for. We treat E-E-A-T as good practice for AI answers, not a guaranteed way in.

E-E-A-T checklist for small business websites

You can't claim E-E-A-T. You can only make it easy to see. These eight steps cover most pages:

1. Name the author with a visible byline. Put "By Name" near the title and link it to a page about that person. A <meta name="author"> tag alone is invisible to readers.
2. Publish a real About page. Say who runs the site, what they make and why they are qualified. Link it from every page, usually in the footer.
3. Make contact easy. Show an email address, phone number or contact page. Being easy to reach is a basic sign of trust.
4. Cite primary sources. Link to the original study, official documentation or law, not to a summary of it.
5. Show first-hand experience. Use your own screenshots, photos, test results and numbers, and say how you got them.
6. Date your content. Show when the page was published and last updated, and keep both dates true.
7. Add matching structured data. Use Person and Organization schema, and set author on your Article or WebPage. It should repeat what the page already shows.
8. Be open about how you work. Link a privacy policy, say how you make money, and fix errors in the open.

Here is an author schema markup example for a blog post. Swap in your own names and addresses, and keep it matching what the page shows:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "BlogPosting",
  "headline": "How to Choose a Coffee Grinder",
  "datePublished": "2026-10-01",
  "dateModified": "2026-10-15",
  "author": {
    "@type": "Person",
    "name": "Priya Shah",
    "jobTitle": "Head roaster",
    "url": "https://example.com/about/"
  },
  "publisher": {
    "@type": "Organization",
    "name": "Example Coffee Co.",
    "url": "https://example.com/"
  }
}
</script>

E-E-A-T signals at a glance

What we changed on our own site

In October 2026 a third-party AEO audit scored our homepage 88 out of 100. Crawler access, schema and content scored full marks. E-E-A-T scored 3 out of 15. We had a meta author tag, but no visible byline, no About page, no visible contact email, no updated date and no links to outside sources.

We fixed it in one afternoon. We added a byline under the headline, a new About page, the email address in the footer, a visible "Updated" date and links to the sources behind four FAQ answers. None of it was hard. It had simply never been visible.