E-E-A-T: How to Demonstrate Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness

What is E-E-A-T?

E-E-A-T is Google’s framework for assessing whether the content on a page is created by someone with experience and subject matter knowledge that others recognize, and whom the reader can trust. The acronym stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. In Danish: experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. The framework originates from Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines, the document that Google’s human quality raters use as a guide when evaluating whether search results are of sufficient quality.

At InboundCPH, we translate these four concepts into four questions a skeptical reader asks herself before taking a website seriously. Has the author personally tried what’s described? Does the author know more about the topic than I do? Do others cite the author as a source? And can I verify that what’s written is true? E-E-A-T isn’t a score you can look up. The framework is a description of what must be provable on the page.

Google itself states that credibility is the most important of the four, because a page lacking credibility has low E-E-A-T, no matter how experienced or reputable the author may appear to be. It’s worth keeping that priority in mind when allocating your efforts. A nice author bio won’t help if the figures on the page can’t be traced back to a source.

Why did the extra "E" appear at the same time as the AI content?

Google added “Experience” to the framework on December 15, 2022, two weeks after ChatGPT was made available to the public on November 30, 2022. Until then, the framework was known as E-A-T. The new “E” poses one additional question regarding the content: Does the page demonstrate that the author has firsthand experience with the topic? Has the reviewer used the product, has the consultant handled similar cases, has the writer personally measured what is being described?

Google hasn’t said that the addition was due to ChatGPT, and you shouldn’t claim that either. But the coincidence explains why “experience” suddenly got its own entry. A language model can write a flawless text on the subject without ever having witnessed a shot being made. It can summarize everything others have written, but it cannot contribute anything it has experienced itself. Experience is one of the four concepts that cannot be generated. That makes it the surest way to stand out from the thousands of dictionary entries that say the same thing.

That policy became clearer in January 2025, when Google updated its Search Quality Rater Guidelines again. Raters were asked to give the lowest rating to pages where the main content was created using generative AI tools without any significant originality or original effort. This is stated in Google’s own guidelines and was mentioned by, among others, Search Engine Land. AI-generated content is therefore not prohibited. Content for which there is no evidence that an experienced human was behind it is what is penalized. At InboundCPH, we interpret it this way: E-E-A-T has become Google’s answer to the question, “Why should I show this particular page when a hundred others say the same thing?”.

How do Google and language models view E-E-A-T in practice?

Google and language models don’t read the Quality Rater Guidelines, but they look for the same clues. These clues include a named author, an organization that can be looked up, sources that can be followed, and a date showing that someone has viewed the page recently. The difference lies in where these clues should be found. Google can read structured data and weigh links. A language model like ChatGPT or Gemini weighs what’s written in the text it retrieves and what other pages say about you. Ahrefs’ analysis of 75,000 brands showed that brand mentions correlate with AI visibility at a strength of 0.66, compared to 0.22 for backlinks. Authority in AI responses is therefore built more on being mentioned than on being linked to.

In InboundCPH’s AI-SEO Tools, we save the full AI response along with a list of sources every time we analyze a question. When we compare the pages that are cited with those that were retrieved but excluded, it’s the same four factors that set them apart. Below, we’ve translated these into actionable steps you can use.

These four themes are related to what we describe in our Introduction to AI-SEO: The language model must be able to vouch for the answers it provides. It therefore selects sources that have taken the initiative to make themselves traceable. The technology behind the markup is described in our guide to schema markup.

How do you check your own 20-point E-E-A-T?

InboundCPH’s E-E-A-T checklist with 20 criteria is a page-by-page review, with five points per concept, where each point can either be demonstrated on the page or not. Use it on your five most important pages first. It’s rare for the entire site to have a problem. Typically, it’s the pages that need to win the commercial battle that are lacking evidence. Count the points per concept and start with the one that has the lowest score.

Experience: Does the page show that you've done this yourselves?

• The page should include at least one example from your own work, either naming the client or describing an anonymized but specific situation.
• There is at least one figure that you have measured yourselves, specifying the method and the time.
• The text describes what didn't work or the limitations of the method.
• The images and screenshots are your own; they are not stock photos or computer-generated illustrations of the subject.
• The author writes in the first person about his own observations, where appropriate.

Expertise: Can the reader tell who knows this?

• The article has a named author with a title and a two- to three-line description of their professional background.
• The author has an indexable profile page on your site that includes a list of other articles.
• Structured data contains author of the type Person with sameAs.
• Technical terms are explained the first time they are used, so that the text demonstrates understanding and not just vocabulary.
• The author has written several articles on the same topic, so there is a consistent professional profile.

Authority: Do others refer people to you?

• Your company or author is mentioned on at least three external sites that are not your own.
• At least one of the mentions is from a trade publication, an industry association, or a conference with an official website.
• Other sites link to this specific page, not just to the home page.
• The author appears in contexts outside the site: podcasts, webinars, lectures, or interviews, with a link.
• The "About" page and the author profile link to the sites where the mention appears, so the trail goes both ways.

Credibility: Can everything on the site be verified?

• All figures include a source with a name, year, and link, and the source actually says what you're writing.
• The page has a visible revision date, and dateModified matches it.
• Contact information, including the address, CVR number, and a person's name, is no more than two clicks away.
• The website does not promise any results that cannot be substantiated, and any disclaimers are included in the text, not in a footnote.
• The site uses HTTPS, and there is a visible policy for corrections or a way to contact the site to report errors.

What changes when a page includes an author profile and sources?

When a page has a named author, traceable sources, and a verifiable revision date, it transforms from a mere claim into a document that Google and language models can use as evidence. Whether this results in higher rankings or citations can only be measured, not guaranteed. But it can be measured, and that’s the point. Below is the method we use at InboundCPH when a client wants to know if working on the evidence makes a difference.

First, here’s an example of what the metrics show before any changes have been made. In September 2026, we tracked the search term “e-e-a-t” in InboundCPH’s AI-SEO Tools. Google displayed an AI response and cited 6 sources in it. The page that ranked number 1 organically was not among the 6. The source the AI response used for its key statement on credibility was a guide from a Danish web agency with a named author, a publication date of May 18, 2026, and a visible update date of May 26, 2026. The other cited sources were short dictionary entries. None of them contained their own measurements. This is a single snapshot and not proof that the date was the cause. But it shows that organic ranking and AI citations are two different things, and that the page with a visible author and date won the citation.

This method offers no guarantees. It allows you to demonstrate E-E-A-T to your own management rather than simply referring to a dictionary definition. We’ve described how to structure the text itself so that it can be both read and cited in our guide to SEO texts. The article on explains how to track citations across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google. Visibility in AI Search.

Frequently Asked Questions About E-E-A-T

Last revised September 6, 2026. The dates for Google’s guidelines have been verified against Google Search Central and Search Engine Land; metrics from InboundCPH’s AI-SEO Tools are updated every 30 days.