E-E-A-T: What Google Wrote, and What the Industry Sells Under the Acronym

The spreadsheet arrived along with the proposal. One of its rows carried a score: E-E-A-T, 6 out of 10. Next to it sat the plan to raise the score. An author page, a bio, badges in the footer.

Before you accept the number, run the search. On September 14, 2026, we searched “e-e-a-t” on Google in Brazil, where we are based. An AI Overview opened the page. It called the acronym a set of criteria Google uses to evaluate content. At the end, it offered help optimizing your site for E-E-A-T. ¹

The screen leaves three questions open. Who wrote this yardstick, and for whom? Does a score like that exist anywhere inside Google? And which parts of that plan have a document behind them? This piece separates what Google wrote from what the industry sells under the acronym.

If you run a medical practice or an accounting firm, the yardstick for your field has its own piece: SEO for doctors and SEO for accounting firms. This one covers the whole acronym, from its origin to its limits.

A manual written for the people who test search

Picture a coffee chain with a hundred locations. Headquarters hires mystery shoppers. Each one carries a checklist: the coffee was hot, the cashier said hello, the change was right. One mystery shopper’s checklist never closes a store. Added up, the checklists show whether the new training worked.

Google has a similar team. They are people who receive search results and rate them, following a public manual. This is called a search quality rater.

The manual is called the Search Quality Rater Guidelines. At the official address, on September 14, 2026, the version posted was the one from September 11, 2025, at 182 pages. ² E-E-A-T lives there, in a section that runs from page 26 to page 28. ²

Page 6 says what the ratings do. No single rating directly changes how a page appears in Search. None of them moves a site up or down. ² The manual gives the reason: humans could never rate every page on the open web one by one. The ratings measure whether search is working and serve as examples of good and bad results. ²

Google has been saying this for at least eleven years. In 2015, it wrote on its developer blog that ratings do not determine where individual sites rank. ³ In 2022, it wrote that the guidelines do not directly influence ranking. ⁴ Today, its page on helpful content says raters have no control over how pages rank. ⁵

The spreadsheet in the proposal gave your site a score. A rater’s checklist measures a test of search, and that rating moves no one up or down.

The four letters, in the manual’s order

The acronym packs four words. The manual defines each one with a question and an example. ²

Experience is how much the content creator has lived the subject firsthand. The manual’s example is a product review. Would you trust someone who used the product, or someone who never held it? ²

Expertise is the knowledge or skill the topic calls for. Here the example is rewiring a house. On one side, a skilled electrician. On the other, an antique homes enthusiast who knows nothing about electrical wiring. ²

Authoritativeness is how well the author or the site is known as a go-to source on the topic. For renewing a passport, the official government page is the unique, official source. ² Topical authority, with the three meanings it carries in the industry, has a piece of its own. The A in the acronym is about being recognized as a source.

Trust is how accurate, honest, safe, and reliable the page is. The manual puts this letter at the center and calls it the most important member of the family. ² Its example has a dry humor to it. A financial scam is still untrustworthy, even when the person behind it is a highly experienced, expert scammer. ² An untrustworthy page has low E-E-A-T, whatever the reason. ²

The other three letters hold up the fourth. The manual says they can overlap, and that the useful combination changes with the topic. ² The helpful content page adds that content does not have to demonstrate all four. ⁵

The E that arrived in 2022

Until 2022, the acronym had three letters: E-A-T. On December 15, 2022, Google’s blog announced the E for experience, in a post signed by Elizabeth Tucker. ⁴

The post’s example comes from everyday life. To fill out your tax return, you want content from an expert in accounting. To pick the software that helps you file, you might prefer a forum discussion with people who have used it. ⁴ The same post says these are not fundamentally new ideas. ⁴

The manual is also older than it looks. Two Portuguese-language texts on the first page of that search say it appeared in 2019. ⁶ Google’s 2015 post says the guidelines were published in 2013. ³

What Google writes about ranking

The sentence that settles almost every meeting sits on the helpful content page. Google’s systems identify a mix of factors that help recognize content with these four qualities. ⁵ E-E-A-T itself is not a specific ranking factor. ⁵ The SEO Starter Guide raises the same question and answers no, in three words. ⁷

The same page says where the weight goes up. These are topics that could affect people’s health, financial stability, or safety. On them, the systems give even more weight to content with strong E-E-A-T. ⁵ Google calls these topics YMYL, short for Your Money or Your Life. ⁵

In my book SEO de Entidade, published in Portuguese, I recorded a silence that confirms the sentence. The internal documentation that leaked in 2024 holds thousands of attributes, and none of them is an E-E-A-T score. ⁸ The acronym describes the target. The measures that chase the target are other things, and none of them has a published weight. ⁸ That bridge between target and measure is my reading, and the book flags it as such. ⁸

What the manual calls YMYL

The manual splits sensitive topics into four groups. Health or safety. Financial security. Government, civics, and society. And a group for other harms to people’s well-being. ²

It treats YMYL as a spectrum. Tsunami evacuation routes are clearly YMYL. A weather forecast might be. Music award winners, probably not. ² How often to replace a toothbrush also falls outside. It is a casual health topic people talk over with friends, and slightly imperfect advice is unlikely to cause harm. ²

The sentence that most reassures a site owner is on page 11. Many topics, maybe most, are not YMYL. They do not require a high level of accuracy or trust to prevent harm. ²

Inside YMYL, a table in the manual separates experience from expertise. A review of a retirement savings service, written by someone who used it, counts as experience. Advice on how much to save and where to invest for retirement is better coming from an expert. ² The same yardstick, applied to medical practices and accounting firms, is in the two pieces linked at the start.

What the industry sells as optimizing for E-E-A-T

On September 14, 2026, I read the first page for “e-e-a-t” on Google in Brazil and in Semrush’s Brazil database. ^{1 6} Together, the two readings gave twelve addresses. Two belonged to Google itself. One was a Brazilian maker of high-voltage test equipment that happens to share the acronym. That left nine industry texts, all in Portuguese. ⁶

The nine look alike in how they define the acronym. When it comes to ranking, they split. Four repeat that E-E-A-T is not a direct factor. ⁶ One says applying E-E-A-T directly impacts your rankings. Another says the guidelines exist to determine how pages rank. A third quotes Google’s statement and concludes, in the very next sentence, that the acronym influences rankings. ⁶

The plan repeats too. Five of the nine ask for a bio or an author page. Three ask for HTTPS and a privacy policy. One tells you to prove your reputation with badges and awards. ⁶ Each item is worth checking against the documents.

Byline and author page

This item has a document behind it. The helpful content page asks three questions about who wrote the content. Is it self-evident to your visitors? Do pages carry a byline where one might be expected? Does the byline lead to more information about the author? ⁵ And Google writes that it strongly encourages accurate authorship information, where readers might expect it. ⁵

The documentation for article structured data goes further. For the author field, it asks for a link to a page that uniquely identifies that person, like a bio page. And it says Google uses that address to tell one author from another. ⁹ The page talks about understanding and representing the author. Ranking does not come up in it. ⁹

Bio

The manual tells raters where to look for signs of E-E-A-T. There are three places. What the site and its authors say about themselves. What others say about them, in independent sources. And what shows on the page itself, with comments and reviews. ²

The About page and the author profile belong to the first place, as a starting point. ² The same passage warns about conflicts of interest. A review written by the product’s own manufacturer counts for less, for that reason. ² A bio the site writes about its own people is the site talking about itself. It opens the conversation, and the confirmation comes from outside.

Badges and awards

I searched the manual for the words badge and seal. Neither one appears in its 182 pages. ² Awards show up somewhere else. In reputation research, the manual tells raters to look for news articles and other pieces written about the business. Awards and other forms of recognition can appear inside those texts. ²

The difference lies in who is talking. An award reported by a newspaper is someone outside confirming. A badge you put in your own footer is the site talking about itself.

HTTPS and privacy policy

The manual cites security as an example of the kind of trust each page needs. An online store needs secure payment and reliable customer service. ² The manual ties trust to the type of page. Nothing I read for this piece turns a technical item into an E-E-A-T score. ^{2 5}

And the small site?

Here the manual says something none of the nine texts say. A small site may have little or no reputation information on the web. That does not indicate high or low quality. ² Many small local businesses live on word of mouth. When reputation is missing, the rater pays extra attention to the other criteria, especially on YMYL topics. ²

Where E-E-A-T meets entity

Picture the byline on a newspaper column. Under the headline sits a name. At the bottom, a line says the columnist is an engineer who writes on Tuesdays. If you don’t know her, you type her name into a search engine. In two minutes, you find out whether she exists outside that newspaper.

The machine walks the same path, with other tools. A loose name in a byline is only text. A name that leads to a single page, linked to records outside the site, becomes an identifiable thing. This is called an entity.

Three documents point to this path, each from its own side. The manual tells raters to check what others say about the author. ² The article documentation asks for the address that identifies the author, and says it helps tell authors apart. ⁹ And the internal documentation leaked in 2024 has attributes that tie documents to authors treated as identifiable things. ⁸ The leak shows that the attributes exist. Their weight, nobody outside Google knows. ⁸

In practice, the path has four stops. The byline on the page. The author page inside the site. The person’s official home, at an address that does not change, following the rules of the entity home. And the outside sources that confirm who she is.

This piece follows the same path. It goes out under my name. My page on this site describes what I do at SEO Genome. It points to my official home, at an address of its own, on a site written in Portuguese.

What Google wrote, side by side with what gets sold

The question for the next spreadsheet

Go back to the spreadsheet with the 6 out of 10. Ask where the number came from. If the answer is Google, ask for the page. Google writes that this factor does not exist. ^{5 7}

Then ask what changes with each item in the plan. Byline and author page have a document behind them. A bio on its own is the site talking about itself. A badge in the footer does not appear in the manual. ^{2 5 9}

Now try an exercise that depends on no proposal at all. Open the three most important pages on your site. For each one, write three things on a sheet of paper. Who signs it. Where the byline leads. And one source outside your site that confirms who that person is.

A blank line is work to do, in the order it appears. The rest of this section starts on our semantic SEO page.

From now on, when someone mentions an E-E-A-T score, you will ask for the document. And the three-page sheet starts today, before the next meeting.