Trust and E-E-A-T

Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust — the signals that decide whether a page is treated as a source or as noise, by a search engine and by a system writing an answer.

103 termsAll terms

What this category covers

What makes a page quotable rather than merely present: who wrote it, what they can be shown to know, what it cites, and whether a reader can tell any of that from the page itself.

E-E-A-T and what each of the four letters is for
Authorship, bylines and credentials
Citations, sources and evidence on the page
Reviews, reputation and third-party signals
Disclosure: sponsorship, AI involvement, conflicts of interest
YMYL — the topics held to a higher standard, and why

Why these words matter

A system needs a reason to quote you

Given two pages with the same answer, the one with an author, a date and a source is the safer thing to cite. That is as true of an assistant as of an editor.

It is the part you can actually build

You cannot decide your ranking. You can decide whether your page names its author, shows its evidence and admits what it does not know.

Here, honesty and visibility agree

Most of this category is a list of ways to stop overclaiming. That is unusual, and worth taking advantage of.

Who needs this vocabulary

Healthcare

Where a wrong answer harms somebody, and every signal of who wrote it is scrutinised.

Finance and fintech

Regulated claims, and readers who have been trained by scams to check the byline.

Legal

Jurisdiction-specific answers, where a missing date makes an accurate page wrong.

Education

Content that is quoted and re-quoted, so an unsourced claim propagates.

E-commerce

Reviews and returns policies as trust signals, and both easy to fake and easy to detect.

B2B software

Comparison pages about competitors, where the disclosure is the credibility.

Terms in this category103 terms

A16

Accuracy5 min read Ad Fontes Media5 min read Advertorial5 min read AI Content Disclosure6 min read AI Ethics Guidelines4 min read AI Slop5 min read Algorithmic Accountability4 min read Algorithmic Transparency5 min read Answer Hijacking6 min read Anthropic Responsible AI5 min read Astroturfing5 min read Auditing5 min read Authenticity6 min read Author Entity6 min read Authority4 min read Authorship5 min read

Blockchain Verification5 min read Brain Rot5 min read Brand Mention6 min read

C11

C2PA5 min read CAI5 min read Citation4 min read Citation Farming5 min read Clanker5 min read Community Guidelines4 min read Conflicts of Interest5 min read Content Labeling5 min read Content Moderation Policy5 min read Corrections Policy4 min read Credibility5 min read

D11

Data Governance5 min read Data Integrity5 min read Data Lineage6 min read Data Security4 min read Data Void6 min read Dead Internet Theory5 min read Deepfake6 min read Digital Signatures5 min read Disclosure5 min read Disclosure of Affiliations4 min read Disinformation4 min read

E-E-A-T6 min read Editorial Guidelines4 min read Editorial Process4 min read Enshittification4 min read Entity Identity5 min read Ethical AI Principles4 min read Ethical Guidelines4 min read Experience4 min read Expertise5 min read

Fabricated Sources5 min read Fact-Checking4 min read Fact-Checking Organizations4 min read

Global Disinformation Index5 min read Google AI Principles5 min read

IBM AI Ethics5 min read IFCN5 min read Impartiality4 min read Independent Review6 min read

LLM Poisoning4 min read

Media Bias/Fact Check5 min read Microsoft Responsible AI5 min read Misinformation4 min read Model Collapse5 min read

Native Advertising4 min read NewsGuard5 min read

OpenAI Content Policy4 min read

Parasite SEO6 min read Partnership on AI4 min read Peer Review4 min read PolitiFact5 min read Poynter Institute4 min read Privacy Policy5 min read Provenance4 min read

Reputation4 min read Reputation Management Software4 min read Responsible AI Development5 min read

S13

Scraped Rewrites5 min read Site Reputation Abuse5 min read Slop5 min read Slopaganda4 min read Slopfluencer4 min read Slopsquatting5 min read Sloptimization4 min read Slopwashing4 min read Snopes4 min read Source Credibility4 min read Sourcewatch5 min read Sponsored Content4 min read Synthetic Media5 min read

Terms of Service5 min read Third-Party Verification5 min read Traffic Apocalypse4 min read Transparency5 min read Trust Signals4 min read Trustworthiness Score4 min read

Undisclosed Generation5 min read User Consent5 min read User-Generated Content Moderation4 min read

Verifiability4 min read

Watermarking5 min read Workslop4 min read

YMYL6 min read

How to use this category

Read what the four letters mean

Start with E-E-A-T itself. Most of the advice in circulation is about one letter and silent on the other three.

Audit one page, not the site

Take the page you most want quoted and ask each question of it: who wrote this, what does it cite, when was it checked.

Make the signal visible

A qualification nobody can see does nothing. The terms here name the specific places it goes.

Common mistakes

Invented authors, or a byline nobody can find anywhere else.
An "expert reviewed" badge that no expert reviewed.
Citing a source that does not say what the sentence claims it says.
Hiding that a page was written by a model. The disclosure costs less than being caught.

Questions about this category

Is E-E-A-T a ranking factor?

Not in the sense of a number in an algorithm. It is a framework from Google's own quality-rater guidelines, describing what a human evaluator should look for. The signals it names are real; a score called E-E-A-T is not.

Does an author box help?

A real one does something: it lets a reader and a machine identify who is responsible. An empty one — a stock photo and a first name — adds a claim you cannot support.

Do I need formal credentials to write about my field?

No. The first E is experience, and it was added precisely because first-hand experience of a thing is evidence of its own. What matters is that it is shown rather than asserted.

Does any of this matter to AI search?

It is one of the few things that clearly does. A system that must attribute an answer prefers a page it can attribute — one with an author, a date and sources of its own.

The other categories

Search engine optimisationThe words that describe how a page is found in a search engine — crawling, indexing, intent, structure, links. This is the ground the AI-search vocabulary is built on, not a separate subject.GEO and AI searchThe vocabulary of being found inside an answer rather than in a list of links: how a system retrieves, what it quotes, and what any of that can be measured with.MeasurementThe words for counting what happened — impressions, share of voice, coverage, sampling, windows, confidence — and, for each of them, what it cannot tell you.Marketing and growthThe commercial vocabulary around search — what an auction actually reports, who your real competitors are, how attention turns into revenue, and the frameworks used to decide what to write next.

See whether assistants quote you

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