E-E-A-T

For service businesses E-E-A-T is concrete, not mystical. Experience is photos of actual jobs and first-person specificity. Expertise is the named practitioner with credentials, not "our team." Authoritativeness is being cited — press, associations, other sites. Trustworthiness is consistency, reviews, transparent pricing, a real address.

Legal and medical businesses feel it hardest because Google classifies those as your-money-your-life categories. Anonymous content mills underperform there; named professionals who demonstrably do the work outperform. The same evidence, notably, is what AI assistants quote when they justify recommending someone.

The first E — experience — was added later than the rest and is the one most sites still ignore. It distinguishes someone who has done the thing from someone who has researched it. For a roofer that is photographs of your own completed jobs with the neighbourhood named, not stock imagery. For a dentist it is the specific case, the specific technique, the number of times you have performed it. Generic accuracy is now table stakes; demonstrated first-hand involvement is the differentiator, precisely because language models made generic accuracy free.

It is worth being clear about what E-E-A-T is not. There is no E-E-A-T score in any Google system, no way to check yours, and no markup that declares it. It is the vocabulary Google's human quality raters use when evaluating results, published so the industry understands what the algorithms are trying to approximate. Anyone selling an E-E-A-T audit with a number attached has invented the number.

The practical work is unglamorous and durable: put real names and real credentials on pages, say when something was published and last reviewed, show the work rather than claiming it, and make sure the claims on your site are corroborated somewhere you do not control. That last point is where E-E-A-T meets backlinks and local citations — self-assertion is cheap, and machines discount it accordingly.