E-E-A-T

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. It is Google's shorthand, taken from the guidelines it gives the human raters who assess search quality, for whether whoever wrote a page has any standing to say what they are saying. It is not a score held in a system somewhere. It is a description of what good sources look like, which both search engines and AI assistants have been built to approximate.

In practice it reduces to a question asked of every page: who is speaking, and why would they know? A page about roof repair written by a roofer of twenty years is a different object from the same words with no author, no history and no way to tell who produced them. The second is not dishonest. It is unattributable — and unattributable sources are the ones a careful system leaves out.

The everyday version of this is unglamorous. Say who is behind the business. Put a real name and a real role on the page. Mention how long you have done this and where you trained. Give an address and a way to reach a human being. Show the work: a case, a number, a photograph of the actual premises. None of it requires a developer, and all of it is checkable.

This is the territory where small sites most often score nothing at all, and the reason is rarely secrecy. It is that the owner knows perfectly well who they are and never thought to write it down. The page quietly assumes a reader who already knows them. Every machine reading it is a stranger.

The human translation is a tradesman's van with a name and a telephone number on the side, set against an unmarked one. Both may do excellent work. Only one of them can be recommended to a friend.