Glossary /Authority & off-page
E-E-A-T
Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust: the framework Google’s quality raters use to judge content, especially on consequential topics.
E-E-A-T comes from Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines, the manual given to the people who assess result quality. It is not a score in the ranking system — raters do not affect individual rankings — but their judgements are used to evaluate algorithm changes, so it describes what the system is being tuned towards.
It weighs heaviest on what Google calls Your Money or Your Life topics: health, finance, legal, safety, anything where bad information causes real harm. On those subjects, who wrote something and whether they are demonstrably qualified matters as much as what they wrote.
The things that demonstrate it are unglamorous and concrete. Named authors with real credentials, first-hand experience made evident in the writing, sources cited and linked, claims that can be checked, and a company that is identifiable and contactable. Trust is the load-bearing element of the four.