E-E-A-T comes from Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines — the manual its human evaluators use to grade result quality. It is not a direct ranking score in an algorithm: there is no 'E-E-A-T number' a page can hold. It is a description of what good looks like, so pages exhibiting it tend to do well in systems tuned to reward quality. The second E, Experience, was added in 2022 specifically to reward content written from first-hand involvement rather than compiled research.
What it looks like in practice: real names and credentials on content, about pages that establish who is responsible, cited sources, first-hand detail a compiler could not know (screenshots, numbers from actual work), a consistent entity across the web. For a service business the cheapest E-E-A-T signal is simply being specific about who did the work and what happened.
Related terms
SEO
Search engine optimization — making pages findable, indexable and worth ranking: technical health plus content people actually want.
Topical authority
Being the site that covers a subject completely — many well-linked pages on one topic beat one page on many topics.
Structured data
Machine-readable markup — usually JSON-LD written in the schema.org vocabulary — that tells search and answer engines what the entities on a page are.
Social proof
Evidence that others already trusted you — reviews, named clients, numbers — the shortest path past a stranger's scepticism.
The bench this belongs to
Web performanceA rebuild that loads on a phone on mobile data, in the country your customers are actually in. Core Web Vitals are the measurement, revenue is the point.
