E-E-A-T

E-E-A-T evolved from E-A-T with the addition of "Experience" in December 2022. The four factors are evaluated together, not separately:

Experience — first-hand experience with the topic. A restaurant review by someone who ate there, a product review by someone who used it, a guide written by someone who has actually worked in the field.

Expertise — domain knowledge, demonstrated through credentials, methodology, or sustained practice. Medical content from a board-certified physician scores higher than the same content from an anonymous writer.

Authoritativeness — recognition by other authorities in the field. Inbound links from respected publications, citations in industry research, professional credentials displayed on the byline.

Trustworthiness — accuracy, citations, transparent author identity, and honest disclosure of conflicts. Pages with named human authors, verifiable credentials, and cited sources score materially higher than the same content with anonymous bylines.

E-E-A-T is not a direct ranking factor — Google's quality raters evaluate content for E-E-A-T as part of training the ranking algorithms, but Google doesn't maintain a numerical E-E-A-T score per page. The practical effect is that pages with strong E-E-A-T signals tend to rank better over time, especially in competitive verticals.

For local businesses, the leverage points are: named author bylines on guides, real testimonials with verifiable sources (G2, Trustpilot), explicit editorial standards, and proper schema markup naming the business as the publisher.