What Is E-E-A-T, and Do AI Assistants Use It?

If you have paid anyone to look at your website in the last few years, you have probably been told to "improve your E-E-A-T". It sounds like a number you are failing. It is not a number at all.

So what is E-E-A-T, who actually uses it, and does it have anything to do with whether ChatGPT or Gemini names your business? The honest answer has a "yes" part, a "no" part and a "nobody outside knows" part.

Below is the short answer, where the four letters come from, why you cannot look up your score, what we can and cannot say about AI assistants, and what the letters ask of a coach or consultant in practice.

What is E-E-A-T?

E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. It is Google's shorthand for the qualities that make a page worth relying on. Google wrote it for the people it pays to grade search results, and it describes what those people should look for.

Google's own page on creating helpful, reliable, people-first content puts the four in order of weight in one line: "Of these aspects, trust is most important." It adds that the others "contribute to trust, but content doesn't necessarily have to demonstrate all of them".

That is the whole idea. A page can earn trust because the writer has done the thing, because the writer is qualified in it, or because other people treat the writer as a source. It does not need all three.

Where the four letters come from

The letters come from Google's search quality rater guidelines, a long handbook for the people who grade its results. For years it was three letters. Google added the second E, for experience, on December 15, 2022.

The announcement explains the addition with an example about taxes. If you want to know how to fill out a tax return, you probably want an accountant. If you want to know which tax software is easiest to live with, you may prefer people who have used it. Both are worth trusting, for different reasons.

That matters to a coach more than it first appears. Experience is the letter most small practices already have and rarely write down. "I have run this program with 40 clients since 2019" is experience. (That sentence is an example, not a real practice.) A list of values is not.

The same announcement ends with a reminder that is easy to miss. The guidelines are used by raters to evaluate how Google's systems are doing, "and they don't directly influence ranking".

Why E-E-A-T is not a score your site has

E-E-A-T is not a score because nothing at Google assigns one to your page. Raters grade a sample of results. Their grades go to Google's engineers as feedback on whether the automated systems are working. The grades do not move any page up or down.

WHERE E-E-A-T SITS AT GOOGLEAS GOOGLE DESCRIBES IT

The main line: what decides where a page shows

Your page

What you published about yourself and your work

Google's ranking systems

Automated. They use many factors, and Google does not list them

The results

What a searcher sees, including the AI features in Google Search

"Search raters have no control over how pages rank."

The side loop: where E-E-A-T is used

Human raters

People who read a sample of results

Grade them on E-E-A-T

Experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trust

Feedback to Google's engineers

It tells them whether the systems seem to be working

AnswerHalo answerhalo.com

CLICK TO ENLARGE

Google says this in plain terms on the same page: "Search raters have no control over how pages rank. Rater data is not used directly in our ranking algorithms." It compares the grades to the feedback cards a restaurant collects from diners. The cards tell the kitchen how it is doing. They do not cook anything.

What about the automated side? Google's wording is careful: "While E-E-A-T itself isn't a specific ranking factor, using a mix of factors that can identify content with good E-E-A-T is useful." So the systems look for signs of the same four qualities. Google does not say which signs, and anyone who claims to know the list is guessing.

This is why a tool cannot show you your E-E-A-T. A tool can show you its own estimate, built on its own rules. That may be a useful prompt to fix something. It is not Google's opinion of you.

Do AI assistants use E-E-A-T?

Google's AI features are built on Google Search, so the advice that covers Search covers them. For ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity, we know of no public statement that any of them uses E-E-A-T. It is Google's term, not a shared standard.

Start with Google, because it is the part on the record. Its guide to AI features says: "The best practices for SEO remain relevant for AI features in Google Search (such as AI Overviews and AI Mode)." It also says there are no additional requirements to appear in them. Google's May 21, 2025 post on doing well in its AI search experiences sends readers back to the same people-first content page that explains E-E-A-T.

So for AI Overviews and AI Mode, the fair reading is this. Whatever part the four qualities play in ordinary Google results, they play there too. Google has not published a separate rule.

The other assistants are a different matter. We have not found a page from OpenAI, Anthropic or Perplexity saying their assistant grades pages on E-E-A-T, and we would not expect one, because the term belongs to Google's rater handbook. If someone tells you "ChatGPT uses E-E-A-T", ask where that is written.

Here is our reasoning, labeled as reasoning and not as a measurement. An assistant that searches the web has to decide which pages to lean on, and then decide what it is willing to repeat about a person. The things that make a human reader trust a page are the same things that make a claim safe to repeat: a name, a stated qualification, a result, and somewhere to check each of them. Whether an assistant can confirm a qualification at all is covered in can AI verify your credentials.

What the four letters ask of a coach or consultant

Each letter turns into one plain question a stranger would ask about you, and each has one line you can put on a page. The table pairs them. None of it is special to AI, which is the point.

Start with the About page, because it is where most of the four belong. The six facts worth stating there are laid out in what a consultant's About page should say. Then look at how your credential is written. Letters after a name tend to get dropped when an assistant retells who you are, which is the subject of what credentials AI assistants actually mention.

One group should take this more seriously than the rest. Google calls topics that could significantly affect someone's health, financial stability or safety "Your Money or Your Life" topics, or YMYL. It says its systems "give even more weight to content that aligns with strong E-E-A-T" for those. If you coach on health or money, a vague page costs you more than it costs a productivity coach.

An admission that cuts against our own interest: you do not need us, or anyone, to "do your E-E-A-T". There is nothing to install. The work is writing down true things about yourself in a form a stranger can check, and most of it takes an afternoon.

What reading your own pages cannot tell you is whether an assistant names you when a buyer asks. That has to be asked. The free check asks ChatGPT 25 real buyer questions from your niche at $0 and emails a plain-English readout with your score, who got named in your place, and the one fix to start with. It runs as soon as you ask for it, and the report lands within the hour between 7am and 5pm Central, or by 10am the next morning outside those hours.