What is E-E-A-T in SEO?

What it is, precisely

It is a section of the guidelines Google gives the people it pays to rate search results by hand. Those ratings do not change any individual result. They are used to evaluate whether changes to the ranking systems made things better or worse.

So E-E-A-T is not a score, not a ranking factor, and not something in your page that an algorithm reads. It is a description of what Google is trying to reward, written for humans, which is why it is useful and why it cannot be gamed directly.

The four, and which you control

Experience is whether the author has actually done the thing. A review written by somebody who used the product reads differently from one assembled from other reviews, and this is the newest of the four precisely because that difference became easy to fake at scale.

Expertise is whether they know the subject. Authoritativeness is whether other people treat them as the place to go. Trust is whether the site can be relied on, and Google says plainly that it is the most important of the four.

Two of these are visible on your own pages: who wrote this, and can this business be identified and contacted. Two are largely about what other sites say about you, which is why no audit that reads only your own pages can score them fully, and why any that claims to is measuring something else.

What is actually checkable on your side

A page saying who runs the business, with a real name behind it. A way to make contact that is not a form into a void. A postal address if you have one. Named authors on anything written as advice, with something to say about why they are worth reading.

Machine-readable identity: an Organization in the structured data with a logo and the profiles that belong to it, so the entity you are is stated rather than inferred.

Ordinary trust signals for anything transactional: prices, terms, a refund policy, a privacy notice that describes what actually happens.

None of these will lift a page on its own. Their absence is what gets noticed — a site asking for money with no identifiable owner is a site a rater is being asked to distrust.

The part nobody can fix for you

Reputation is earned elsewhere. Being cited, reviewed, mentioned and linked to by people who are not you is the substance of Authoritativeness, and there is no markup for it.

This is where most E-E-A-T advice quietly stops being advice. Publishing testimonials you wrote and marking them up as reviews does not work: search engines have ignored self-serving review markup for years, and inventing the reviews to fill it is the kind of thing that earns a manual penalty rather than a rich result.