Fazley RabbiE-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. It comes from Google's search quality rater guidelines, the document Google gives to people who review search results to judge whether its systems are surfacing good pages. It is not a score, a plugin or a setting on your site. It is a way of describing what makes content believable, and Google's automated systems look for many signals that line up with it. For a business website, it comes down to one question: would a careful customer trust this page?
The four parts, with everyday examples
Experience
Has the person behind the content actually done or used the thing? A review of a generator written by someone who ran it through a season of load-shedding is worth more than a list of specifications copied from a brochure. For a business, experience shows in real photos of your work, a description of your own process, and the small details only someone who has done the job would know.
Expertise
Does the author have the knowledge the topic needs? For a recipe, years of home cooking may be enough. For medicine, law or tax, formal qualifications matter. A hypothetical pharmacy's page on storing insulin at home should be written or checked by a qualified pharmacist, and the page should say so.
Authoritativeness
Is the site or the person a recognised source on the topic? This is built over time, mostly outside your own website: mentions in local news, links from trade associations or suppliers, reviews on your Google Business Profile, being the name people recommend when someone asks in a Facebook group.
Trust
Is the page accurate, honest and safe to act on? Google's own guidelines describe trust as the most important of the four; the other three support it. A page written by an expert can still be untrustworthy if it hides who is behind it, makes claims it cannot back up, or handles payments carelessly.
Is E-E-A-T a ranking factor?
Not in the sense of a single dial Google turns up or down. Quality raters do not change the ranking of individual sites; their ratings help Google check whether its systems are working as intended. But those systems are built to reward content that people would find reliable, so the practical effect is similar: pages that show real experience and earn trust tend to do better over time.
The bar is higher for topics Google calls "Your Money or Your Life": health, finance, legal matters, safety, and anything that could seriously affect someone's wellbeing or money. A clinic, a diagnostic centre, an insurance agent or anyone giving financial advice needs to show trust more carefully than a gift shop does.
How a small business shows E-E-A-T
- Say who you are. A real About page with the owner's name, the business story in plain words, and a physical address if you have one.
- Name the author of articles and guides, with a line on why they know the subject.
- Show your own work: photos from your workshop, farm or office instead of stock images, and descriptions of how you actually do things.
- Make contact easy: phone, WhatsApp, email and address, matching your Google Business Profile and Facebook page.
- Be clear on what customers worry about: delivery areas, cash on delivery or bKash and Nagad payment, returns and warranties.
- Keep facts current. Old prices, closed branches or a dead phone number cost trust quickly.
- Earn mentions elsewhere: genuine reviews, supplier and association listings, local press. The guide to earning good links without buying spam shows how.
- Have expert content checked by a qualified person whenever it touches health, money, law or safety.
What does not work
Fake author profiles with invented degrees, purchased reviews, "as featured in" badges for coverage that never happened, and AI-written articles published under a made-up expert's name. These can work against you once noticed, by Google or by customers, and they undermine the very trust E-E-A-T describes. If you use AI to help draft content, keep a knowledgeable person in charge: they check the facts, add real experience and decide what gets published.
Common questions
Do I need to be famous to rank? No. A local business can show strong experience and trust for its own area and services without being a household name.
Should every page have an author? Articles and advice pages benefit most. Product and service pages benefit more from clear business details, real photos and honest policies.
Does E-E-A-T matter for AI search too? AI tools that answer questions also tend to lean on sources that look reliable and consistent across the web. See making your facts easy for AI to find.
A first step for this week
Open your About and Contact pages and read them as a stranger would. Is it obvious who runs the business, where it is, and how to reach a real person? If not, start there. If you would like help reviewing the rest of the site with this lens, my SEO, AEO, GEO and AIO service covers it.