E-E-A-T Is Made Up

Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness - E-E-A-T - is the SEO industry's favorite buzzword, the thing that every conference dedicates sessions to, that every audit mentions as a deficiency you need to fix, that every agency promises to improve for you, and that fits nicely alongside the 200 ranking factors myth in the pantheon of things people believe without evidence.

It's not a ranking factor.

What E-E-A-T Actually Is

E-E-A-T comes from Google's Quality Rater Guidelines, which is a document Google gives to human contractors who manually evaluate search results, and the key word there is manually, because these raters don't affect your rankings directly but rather rate results to help Google evaluate whether their algorithms are working, which makes it a feedback loop for algorithm development rather than a ranking signal itself.

Google has explicitly said this, multiple times, and John Mueller has said this, and the documentation says this, but the SEO industry ignores it because E-E-A-T is good for business and admitting it's not a ranking factor would undermine a lot of consulting revenue.

The E-E-A-T Industrial Complex

E-E-A-T is perfect for selling services because it has all the characteristics of a concept designed to separate clients from their money:

It's vague, and nobody can tell you what exactly "expertise" means or how to measure "trust," which means there are no clear answers, which means there are endless consulting hours to bill while you figure it out.

It's unfalsifiable, because if your rankings went up, that proves the E-E-A-T improvements worked, and if your rankings went down, that proves you didn't have enough E-E-A-T yet, which is the kind of logic that can never be proven wrong and should therefore be treated with extreme suspicion.

It sounds important, because "we need to improve your E-E-A-T signals" sounds much more sophisticated than "you need better content," even though the latter is what you probably actually need.

Agencies love E-E-A-T because it creates problems that only they can solve, which is a nice business model if you can get it.

What Google Can Actually Measure

Google can't read your author's LinkedIn profile and assess their expertise, and they can't evaluate whether your CEO is trustworthy by looking at their face, because these are human judgments that require human understanding that algorithms don't have.

What they can actually measure is much more mundane: user behavior like whether people click and whether they stay and whether they come back; content patterns like whether the content matches what typically ranks for this query (reading a SERP tells you this); link patterns like whether authoritative sites link to this; and brand signals like whether people search for this site by name.

These are concrete, measurable signals that computers can actually count, whereas "expertise" and "trustworthiness" are human judgments that algorithms can only approximate through proxies, which is a fancy way of saying they're guessing based on things they can count.

The Author Bio Myth

The most common E-E-A-T advice is to add detailed author bios, which sounds reasonable until you think about it logically and realize that you can write anything in an author bio - "Dr. John Smith, 20 years experience, Harvard graduate, trusted by millions" - and then ask yourself whether Google is going to fact-check that by calling Harvard or verifying credentials, and the answer is obviously no, they're not, because they're a search engine and not a background check service.

Author bios might help users trust content, and that's fine, but the idea that Google is algorithmically verifying expertise through bio text is a fantasy that exists because it's easier to add a bio than to actually become an expert.

What Actually Matters

Instead of chasing E-E-A-T ghosts, you could focus on things that actually affect your rankings:

Make content that genuinely helps people, because if it's useful, people engage with it, and engagement is something Google can actually measure rather than guess at.

Build a real brand by getting people to search for you by name, which is an authority signal Google can actually measure because it shows up in their search data.

Earn real links from sites that actually matter in your space, not manufactured "E-E-A-T links" from sites that exist only to sell links.

Be consistent by publishing regularly on your topic, because topical depth is measurable and demonstrates expertise through action rather than through claims.

These are things that matter, as opposed to author bios and "trust signals" that mostly matter to the people selling E-E-A-T consulting services.

E-E-A-T is what Google wishes their algorithms could measure. It's not what they actually rank on. Stop optimizing for aspirations.