What is EEAT and how do you prove it on your website?
Experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trust: the signals you can actually publish.
EEAT stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust. It is not a score in an algorithm you can look up. It is a set of things you either publish on the page or you do not, and the fix list is short and concrete.
What each letter actually asks for
- Experience: has the writer done this thing? Prove it with specifics. Named tools, real numbers from your own work, the failure mode you hit in year two. Generic advice reads as secondhand because it is.
- Expertise: does the writer know the subject? Prove it with a real byline, a bio, credentials, and a link to who that person is.
- Authoritativeness: does anyone else say so? Prove it with citations to primary sources, third party mentions, partner badges and named certifications.
- Trust: is this business real and safe to deal with? Prove it with a physical address, a working phone number, clear pricing, real reviews, HTTPS, and a privacy policy that matches what you actually do.
The publishable checklist
Named author on every article, with a bio page. Publish and updated dates that are honest. Links to the primary source whenever you state a fact, the vendor's own documentation rather than someone's summary of it. A visible about page with real people on it. Contact details that are not a form only. Reviews you did not write.
Where AI written content breaks EEAT
Not because a machine touched it. Because unedited AI copy has no experience in it, cites nothing, and is attributed to nobody. It reads like a summary of other summaries, which is exactly what it is. Used as a drafting tool, under a named expert who adds real specifics and checks the facts, it is fine. Published raw, it is the fastest way to look like everyone else.
This matters more, not less, in AI search. A model choosing who to cite is doing the same thing a careful reader does: looking for a source it can stand behind.
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