E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust

Each component evaluates a different dimension of source quality.

• Experience: has the author actually done the thing they're writing about? (Owned the product, treated the patient, lived in the city.) The newest addition, added in late 2022, and increasingly important.
• Expertise: does the author have the formal or demonstrable knowledge to write authoritatively? (Credentials, qualifications, professional training.)
• Authoritativeness: is the author or publisher recognized as a leading source on this topic? (Citations from peers, industry recognition, mentions in authoritative publications.)
• Trust: is the website itself trustworthy? (Transparent about authors, editorial standards, corrections; secure technical setup; honest about commercial relationships.) Google's quality team has stated trust is the most important of the four.

YMYL topics — health, finance, legal, civic, safety, and major life decisions — are the categories where Google applies the strictest E-E-A-T bar. A medical condition page from a generic blog will struggle to rank against a hospital, a doctor's named bio page, or a peer-reviewed journal.

If your business operates in a YMYL space, E-E-A-T isn't optional — it's the price of entry. Investments in author bios, credentialed editorial review, citation hygiene, and About-page transparency pay for themselves quickly.

E-E-A-T is signalled by concrete page elements and site-level patterns. The high-leverage signals:

• Named authors with linked bios on every editorial page (not "by admin" or "by [Brand]" without a person).
• Author bios that include real credentials, professional memberships, and external profile links (LinkedIn, Wikipedia, professional registry).
• Editorial standards page describing fact-checking, sourcing, corrections, and conflict-of-interest policies.
• Citations to authoritative sources within content (linked, not just mentioned).
• About page that names the team, describes the company history, and provides verifiable contact information.
• Reviewed-by or medically-reviewed-by labels with a credentialed reviewer's name.
• Real business signals: NAP, professional registration numbers, BBB accreditation, industry certifications.

Google's stated position: it doesn't penalize content based on production method, only on quality. In practice, AI content published without a credentialed human reviewer fails E-E-A-T tests — there's no real author, no real experience, no demonstrable expertise. The Helpful Content System has consistently demoted such sites in recent updates.

The compliant pattern: use AI for research, drafting, and editing assistance, but require named human experts to author, review, and take responsibility for every published page. The byline isn't decorative — it's a trust signal Google increasingly weights.

Generic admin-bylined posts on YMYL topics. Author pages with no credentials or external profiles. About pages that don't name a real team. No editorial standards page. No reviewed-by labels on medical or financial content. Stock-photo headshots that reverse-image-search to other sites. These patterns add up to a low-trust source profile.