E-E-A-T
Google's framework for judging content quality: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.
What is E-E-A-T?
E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. The four qualities Google's own human quality raters look for when judging whether content is genuinely helpful. A product review written by someone who actually bought and used the item demonstrates Experience; a medical article written by a credentialed doctor demonstrates Expertise.
Why it matters
E-E-A-T isn't a ranking algorithm itself (it's part of Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines, a public document used by human raters to evaluate how well Google's ranking systems are performing overall, and those individual rater scores don't directly determine any one page's ranking. The framework started as "E-A-T" and gained its second "E" for Experience in a December 2022 update, specifically to assess whether content shows some degree of firsthand use of a product, a visited place, or a lived experience being communicated. Google states explicitly that Trust is treated as the most important member of the group, and that content doesn't need to demonstrate all four aspects at once) some pages are helpful primarily because of the experience they show, others primarily because of the expertise they convey.