GOOGLE E-E-A-T AND THE QUALITY RATER GUIDELINES

Google's automated systems are designed to use many different factors to rank great content. After identifying relevant content, our systems aim to prioritize those that seem most helpful. To do this, they identify a mix of factors that can help determine which content demonstrates aspects of experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, or what we call E-E-A-T.

Of these aspects, trust is most important. The others contribute to trust, but content doesn't necessarily have to demonstrate all of them. For example, some content might be helpful based on the experience it demonstrates, while other content might be helpful because of the expertise it shares.

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. For example, our systems give even more weight to content that aligns with strong E-E-A-T for topics that could significantly impact the health, financial stability, or safety of people, or the welfare or well-being of society. We call these "Your Money or Your Life" topics, or YMYL for short.

Search quality raters are people who give us insights on if our algorithms seem to be providing good results, a way to help confirm our changes are working well. In particular, raters are trained to understand if content has strong E-E-A-T. The criteria they use to do this is outlined in our search quality rater guidelines.

Search raters have no control over how pages rank. Rater data is not used directly in our ranking algorithms. Rather, we use them as a restaurant might get feedback cards from diners. The feedback helps us know if our systems seem to be working.

Reading the guidelines may help you self-assess how your content is doing from an E-E-A-T perspective, improvements to consider, and help align it conceptually with the different signals that our automated systems use to rank content.

Ask "Who, How, and Why" about your content

Consider evaluating your content in terms of "Who, How, and Why" as a way to stay on course with what our systems seek to reward.

Who (created the content)

Something that helps people intuitively understand the E-E-A-T of content is when it's clear who created it. That's the "Who" to consider. When creating content, here are some who-related questions to ask yourself:

Is it self-evident to your visitors who authored your content?
Do pages carry a byline, where one might be expected?
Do bylines lead to further information about the author or authors involved, giving background about them and the areas they write about?

If you're clearly indicating who created the content, you're likely aligned with the concepts of E-E-A-T and on a path to success. We strongly encourage adding accurate authorship information, such as bylines to content where readers might expect it.

How (the content was created)

It's helpful to readers to know how a piece of content was produced: this is the "How" to consider including in your content.

For example, with product reviews, it can build trust with readers when they understand the number of products that were tested, what the test results were, and how the tests were conducted, all accompanied by evidence of the work involved, such as photographs. It's advice we share more about in our Write high quality product reviews help page.

Many types of content may have a "How" component to them. That can include automated, AI-generated, and AI-assisted content. Sharing details about the processes involved can help readers and visitors better understand any unique and useful role automation may have served.

If automation is used to substantially generate content, here are some questions to ask yourself:

Is the use of automation, including AI-generation, self-evident to visitors through disclosures or in other ways?
Are you providing background about how automation or AI-generation was used to create content?
Are you explaining why automation or AI was seen as useful to produce content?

Overall, AI or automation disclosures are useful for content where someone might think "How was this created?" Consider adding these when it would be reasonably expected. For more, see our blog post and FAQ: How Google Search views AI-generated content.

Why (was the content created)

"Why" is perhaps the most important question to answer about your content. Why is it being created in the first place?

The "why" should be that you're creating content primarily to help people, content that is useful to visitors if they come to your site directly. If you're doing this, you're aligning with E-E-A-T generally and what our core ranking systems seek to reward.

If the "why" is that you're primarily making content to attract search engine visits, that's not aligned with what our systems seek to reward. If you use automation, including AI-generation, to produce content for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings, that's a violation of our spam policies.