E-E-A-T: what Google actually asks of your content

Let me start with something that will make you feel better about money you did not spend.

There are offers doing the rounds promising “E-E-A-T optimisation”, with a price list and packages. It sounds serious, it even has hyphens in it. The problem is that Google writes that E-E-A-T is not a ranking factor. That is not me being provocative, it is the documentation, in these words: “While E-E-A-T itself isn’t a specific ranking factor, using a mix of factors that can identify content with good E-E-A-T is useful.”

Read it twice, because both halves are in there. There is no dial to turn up. And yet it is not irrelevant either, because Google really does look for signals that point at the same thing. So let us see what it actually is, what it asks for, and what someone with a small site does about it.

The four letters, no mystery

Experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness.

The first E was added last and is the most interesting one for small businesses: experience. It does not ask whether you have a degree in the subject, it asks whether you have lived it. The plumber writing about leaks has experience. The copywriter who read three articles and wrote a fourth does not.

And there is a hierarchy everybody forgets. Google writes: “Of these aspects, trust is most important. The others contribute to trust, but content doesn’t necessarily have to demonstrate all of them.”

Which means you do not need to be experienced and expert and famous all at once. You need to be trustworthy, and the rest exist to support that. A relief, isn’t it?

The 182 pages you are allowed to read

There is a document few people know about, and it is public: the search quality rater guidelines. Google gives it to human beings, actual contracted people, who sit and grade search results. The current version, dated 11 September 2025, runs to 182 pages.

I give the date because the number changes with every revision. You will see texts saying 168 or 176 pages, and they are not lying, they are just old.

And here is the misunderstanding that costs money: raters do not change your page’s ranking. There is no person who saw your site and marked it down. Their work is a control sample: Google changes something in its systems, raters judge whether results got better or worse, and the change is kept or thrown out accordingly.

So why do we care? Because the document tells us what Google considers good. It is like the teacher handing you the marking scheme before the exam. Not the answers, but the next best thing.

The system that stopped being a system

In August 2022 Google announced the Helpful Content Update, a separate system looking at whether content was written for people or for machines.

And then something happened that half the guides skip. In March 2024 it stopped being separate. The wording: “In March 2024, it evolved and became part of our core ranking systems.”

You will find plenty of texts placing this in September 2023. That is wrong, and it is not harmless: as long as you think of it as a separate filter, you sit waiting for it to “run” and judge you. It does not run. It is inside, all the time.

The questions it asks you to answer yourself

The most practical part of the documentation is not instructions, it is questions. Google asks you to look at your own text and answer honestly. A few, verbatim:

“Does the content provide original information, reporting, research, or analysis?”

“Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?”

“Does the content provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?”

Then come three families of questions around who, how and why.

On who: “Is it self-evident to your visitors who authored your content?” A simple question, and half the websites I look at fall over it. Articles with no byline, an “about” page with no human in it, a contact form with no name.

On how, the question that matters today: “Is the use of automation, including AI-generation, self-evident to visitors through disclosures or in other ways?” Notice what it does not say. It does not forbid automation. It asks that it not be hidden.

On why: “Why is it being created in the first place?” And Google answers that one too: if it is made primarily to rank rather than to help people, that is a spam policy violation.

What all this means for a small business

Let me tell you what it does not mean first, because that is where the money goes.

It does not mean you need certifications, awards, or an author with titles. It does not mean writing five hundred words a week to “feed the algorithm”. And it certainly does not mean there is a service that raises your E-E-A-T, because there is no quantity to raise.

It means something more boring and much cheaper: evidence that there is a person behind the text who did the work. A name on every article. Real contact details, not just a form. Your own numbers from your own projects, not borrowed from someone else’s chart. A source next to every statistic. And a date, so the reader knows when what they are reading was true.

That is editorial work, not technical work. Which is why most people do not do it: it does not sell as a package.

And the part that concerns us, plainly

A declaration, because the subject of this article demands one.

On this blog, every statistic you find carries a link to a primary source. Not to another article repeating it, to the source. When a figure cannot be verified, I say so instead of using it, and I have done that several times: the “$5,600 a minute”, the “60% versus JPEG”, the study attributed to the wrong company. And where I use our own numbers, I say which project they came from and what measured them.

I do not do it for Google. I do it because it is the only thing that justifies you giving me ten minutes of your day. Which is, if you think about it, exactly what E-E-A-T describes: trustworthiness that shows, rather than trustworthiness that is claimed.

Which brings us back to that offer at the start, with its packages and its price list. There is nothing to buy. There is something to demonstrate. If you want to look at what your site demonstrates today and what is missing from the things Google itself asks for, get in touch.