E-E-A-T: what Google actually says

The guidelines introduce the four together: "Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust (E-E-A-T) are all important considerations in PQ rating." PQ is page quality.

The most important member at the center of the E-E-A-T family is Trust.

Google Search Quality Rater Guidelines, section 3.4, edition dated 11th Sep 2025

Google's Search Central documentation says the same thing for creators: "Of these aspects, trust is most important. The others contribute to trust, but content doesn't necessarily have to demonstrate all of them."

The guidelines describe experience, expertise and authoritativeness as "concepts that can support your assessment of Trust". They are inputs to one judgment, not four scores.

The rater guidelines are a public manual for the contractors who grade Google's search results. Google says the ratings "help us benchmark the quality of our results".

On their effect on rankings, Google is consistent across three documents.

How Search Works: "These ratings do not directly impact ranking, but they do help us benchmark the quality of our results and make sure these meet a high bar all around the world."

Search Central, on the guidelines: they "don't directly influence ranking".

The people-first content page adds an image: "Rater data is not used directly in our ranking algorithms. Rather, we use them as a restaurant might get feedback cards from diners."

So E-E-A-T describes what Google's systems are tuned to reward. It is not a score a page carries.

While E-E-A-T itself isn't a specific ranking factor, using a mix of factors that can identify content with good E-E-A-T is useful.

Google Search Central, "Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content", read 6th Sep 2026

The same page tells creators to judge their own content "in terms of 'Who, How, and Why' as a way to stay on course with what our systems seek to reward".

Who made the content, how it was made, and why it exists. Those three questions are Google's own summary of the exercise.

The page also carries two lists of self-assessment questions, headed "Content and quality questions" and "Expertise questions". They are the rubric Google points to after every core update.

The guidelines define YMYL in section 2.3: "Some topics have a high risk of harm because content about these topics could significantly impact the health, financial stability, or safety of people, or the welfare or well-being of society."

Harm can reach "the person who is directly viewing or using the content", "other people who are affected by the person who viewed the content", or "groups of people or society".

The current edition lists categories including "YMYL Government, Civics & Society", covering "election and voting information" and "trust in public institutions", alongside health, finance and safety.

This is why health and finance sites feel core updates more sharply. The Medic update of August 2018 is the classic example.

Google announced the change on 15th Dec 2022 in a Search Central post titled "Our latest update to the quality rater guidelines: E-A-T gets an extra E for Experience".

The post asked: "Does content also demonstrate that it was produced with some degree of experience, such as with actual use of a product, having actually visited a place or communicating what a person experienced?"

Its example separated the two kinds of authority. Tax-return instructions call for "an expert in the field of accounting"; reviews of tax software might be better served by "a forum discussion from people who have experience with different services".

Google called these "not fundamentally new ideas". The post repeated that the guidelines "don't directly influence ranking".

The edition dated 11th Sep 2025 defines generative AI as "a type of machine learning (ML) model that can take what it has learned from the examples it has been provided to create new content".

It adds: "Generative AI can be a helpful tool for content creation, but like any tool, it can also be misused."

On rating, the instruction is about effort, not tooling. Pages with little "original content or added value for users, should be rated Lowest, no matter how they are created".

Raters are told to use the Lowest rating "when you strongly suspect scaled content abuse", even when "unsure of the method of creation". Scaled content abuse is also a spam policy since March 2024.