GLOSSARY
E-E-A-T
Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness
One sentence of definition, and how it differs from the concepts it gets confused with. The definition is written to be quoted as it stands.
DEFINITION
E-E-A-T is Google's perspective on content quality: experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. It is not a defined score but a bundle of criteria for judging whether a document and a brand are trustworthy.
Easily confused with
It is not a score
There is no value called an E-E-A-T score. It is a perspective from the search quality rater guidelines, a frame human raters use when evaluating the system. 'We will raise your E-E-A-T score' is a promise that cannot hold.
Your own claims do not fill it
Two of the four — authoritativeness and trustworthiness — are values confirmed externally. Writing 'specialist firm' on your own site and having the same fact confirmable from an independent source carry different weight.
In practice
- Fill in what is confirmable first — authorship, publication and update dates, links to evidence, entity information (representative, address, business registration).
- Use records with conditions attached instead of adjectives. 'Across the 40 audits we ran in the first half of 2026' is more citable than 'many companies'.
Related terms
Where this leads
- Is your company ready to appear in AI search? A 20-point self-check A readiness checklist a company can run itself with no external tools. Twenty items across five areas — discoverability, entity, content, external trust, measurement — with the reason each one matters.
- Entity SEO Aligning information so the company is recognised as one entity
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