E-E-A-T Audit

What E-E-A-T means

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust. The notion comes from the guidelines Google gives the people it employs to evaluate the quality of search results, not from a public algorithm.

This is also where the most frequent misunderstanding comes from: E-E-A-T is not a grade that Google calculates for your website, and there is no official score anywhere. It is a way of describing what makes a page worthy of trust. An E-E-A-T audit therefore does not tell you what position you will have in search, but which of the trust signals are missing from the site.

Why trust weighs the most

The rater guidelines are unusually direct about this: pages that do not inspire trust have low E-E-A-T however much experience, expertise or authority they may seem to have. In other words, the other three letters do not make up for the missing last one.

For this reason, the E-E-A-T audit above gives identity the largest weight and, for sites that touch on topics with real stakes, caps the grade when the visitor cannot find out who is responsible for the site.

What the E-E-A-T audit on this page checks

The identity of the publisher

The company name with its legal form, the tax identification code, the Trade Register number, the postal address, the means of contact, the privacy policy and the terms of use. The tax code is not just searched for on the page but also verified mathematically, on its check digit, so a number written wrongly or made up shows up immediately.

Consistency between pages

This is the most useful part, because a tool that looks at a single address cannot do it at all. A site may say on the homepage that it has eighteen years of experience, in the “About us” section that it has nineteen, and in the structured data it may declare an entirely different founding year. Each statement seems reasonable on its own, but together they contradict each other, and that is exactly what a human rater notices too.

The author's byline

Whether the articles are signed, whether the author is declared in the structured data, whether the name links to a page where one can find out who the person is and what their background is. These criteria apply only to articles: a page presenting a service has no reason to carry a byline and a publication date.

Content signals

Article structured data, the publication and last update dates, references to authoritative sources, the depth of the text and the signs of first-hand experience, meaning the wording through which the page shows that someone actually worked with the subject described.

What YMYL pages are and why they matter

Google uses YMYL, from Your Money or Your Life, for pages that can affect someone's health, money, safety or rights: medical services, insurance, loans, legal advice, shops that take payments. For them, the trust requirements are higher than for the rest of the web.

The E-E-A-T audit recognizes these topics on its own and raises the bar accordingly. A medical site that does not say which company operates it receives a much harsher grade than a personal blog with the same gaps would, because the stakes for the reader are different.

What no automated tool can verify

Reputation, meaning what others say about you in independent sources, is at the center of the evaluation in Google's guidelines, but it cannot be read from the code of a page. Likewise, no tool can confirm remotely that the information in a text is actually correct, that the author really has the background they claim, or that they truly used the product they write about.

The report says these things openly, instead of covering them with an invented score. An E-E-A-T audit that gave a grade for reputation by reading only HTML would produce a figure with nothing behind it.

How to use the result

Start with what appears under identity and consistency, because that is where the fix is cheapest and has the largest effect: the company details are filled in once, and the contradictions are resolved by choosing one wording and carrying it across all pages. Only then is it worth working on the author byline and on content, where the effort is greater and shows over time.

If you want someone to go through your website from end to end, not just the signals that can be read automatically, you can write to us through the contact page.