What is E-E-A-T in 2026 and how does it affect website promotion in Google and AI?

• What is E-E-A-T and why did we not stop at one "E"
• Will E-E-A-T help in comprehensive website promotion
• How to optimize a website with E-E-A-T: step-by-step guide
  • Experience — an effective method to counter synthetic content
  • Expertise — the opportunity to showcase your knowledge and qualifications
  • Authoritativeness — building a recognized source of information in your niche
  • Trustworthiness — a key component of E-E-A-T
• How to build a website in YMYL without the risk of demotion

E-E-A-T — is a quality concept that helps search engines understand whether to include both the site and its individual pages in the search results. While previously SEO specialists viewed it as a recommendation, by 2026 it became a fundamental filter not only for Google but also for other search engines and artificial intelligence systems. Therefore, I conducted research by collecting and analyzing Google’s internal guidelines and the results of recent algorithm updates so that you could not only understand what E-E-A-T is but also build it yourself, even if you are not a certified specialist in your niche.

What is E-E-A-T and why did we not stop at one "E"

The quality assessment concept began to take shape back in 2014 when the abbreviation E-A-T first appeared in the guidelines for search quality raters — live people hired by Google for manual quality assessment of websites. At that time, the main goal was to create a mechanism capable of filtering out low-quality content on topics that directly affect user health, finances, and safety — YMYL niches.

And it showed its effectiveness on August 1, 2018, after the Medic Update, when websites without clearly expressed signals of authoritativeness and expertise in YMYL lost 30-50% of organic traffic in just a few days. However, the real transformation occurred in December 2022 when a second "E" — Experience was added to the abbreviation.

The official introduction of the fourth component was motivated by the desire to better evaluate content that reflects real experiences, such as reviews from people who have actually used the product. However, at that time, there was a rapid spread of artificial intelligence tools used to generate synthetic content. AI could already imitate expert knowledge by synthesizing information from the web, so the practical experience of the author became the main quality indicator that is difficult to fake.

The concept of E-E-A-T not only remained but strengthened after September 2023 — one of the most powerful Helpful Content Updates that brought down thousands of websites with synthetic content. In March 2024, Google announced that the Helpful Content System is integrated directly into the core ranking systems, meaning that the principles of usefulness and authenticity of content are now considered for every site, regardless of the topic.

In January 2025, Google updated the Search Quality Rater Guidelines again, adding clarifications regarding the evaluation of AI-generated content. If a page is created automatically without added value and human oversight, it receives the lowest quality rating. And of course, this year could not pass without updates: the March 2026 Core Update tightened the requirements for "information gain." Now websites that simply paraphrase others' opinions, i.e., the previously popular rewriting, lose visibility in favor of original sources with unique data.

Also read: How to pull a website out of a traffic pit after Spam Update and AI Overviews

Will E-E-A-T help in comprehensive website promotion

Websites whose content combines experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness have a chance for successful promotion not only in Google search results. Although in other search engines, such as Bing, the concept of E-E-A-T is somewhat different, its main elements play a significant role in ranking the pages of the web resource. Even artificial intelligence systems, including ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, cite only reliable and authoritative sources.

Promoting a site in Google without adhering to the requirements for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, even with technically flawless optimization, is extremely complicated. The concept of E-E-A-T is the core of SQRG, the criteria of which the Google algorithm is actively trained to recognize. And it officially confirms:

"Google's ranking systems are designed to reward original, high-quality content that demonstrates the properties of what we call E-E-A-T."

Bing, which is the second-largest search engine, uses its own quality assessment criteria. Although the system is somewhat simplified, the search engine explicitly states that for assessing authoritativeness, it considers the author's identity, links to authoritative sources, and social media. In 2025, Bing, like Google before it, intensified its focus on these criteria, especially for YMYL topics.

The components of E-E-A-T are critically important for Bing, which is the foundation for ChatGPT Search and Microsoft Copilot. For example, in the screenshot from Bing Webmaster Tools, you see data from my English-language site, which was mentioned 5200 times in AI responses from January to March 2026. Of those, there were 398 visits to the site, meaning the CTR was 7.65%. So on one hand, traffic from neural networks exists, but on the other hand, its small amount confirms the "clickless era," as before AI Overview, the first position in search gave 30-40% CTR.

However, despite the small percentage, such statistics force a reevaluation of strategy. If your site does not meet E-E-A-T criteria, it risks disappearing from the radars of both AI assistants and classic search engines, receiving no visits at all. Therefore, working on authoritativeness today is not just a bonus to ranking but one of the most reliable ways to attract targeted visitors who can become your customers.

How to optimize a website with E-E-A-T: step-by-step guide

The goal of optimizing a website for E-E-A-T is to show users and search engines that your content is created by people who have sufficient expertise and experience to cover the topic. For this, it is important to know the ways that will help separately showcase experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, and together — create the same authoritative source of information that both your audience and Google, Bing, and AI systems are looking for.

Experience — an effective method to counter synthetic content

Website owners who say that content writers are no longer needed are right, but only partially. In 2026, artificial intelligence can write articles on all possible topics, whether it's meditation, workouts, motherhood, tax payments, or debt repayment strategies. If you provide a clear brief, you will receive a technically sound text.

Fortunately, there remains something that AI systems cannot provide — personal experience. They cannot tell how Elementor AI failed to remove the camera from a photo, instead replacing it with a chaotic mix of details. Or how I spent 3 hours communicating with a bank's support service to unblock an unfortunate 1000 UAH from a friend. It can imitate experience if you ask it to, but even then it will simply produce rehashed information from others. This is the uniqueness of experience — it is unique to everyone, making it valuable as a signal of authenticity. 

To effectively demonstrate experience, include in the content:

• unique photos and videos — original product shots, screenshots of processes, testing videos. If writing about a mobile app — insert screenshots, if about repairing equipment — add your own photos of the process;
• subjective feelings — details and emotions that vary from person to person but provide a better understanding of the topic. For example, "Most meditations in Headspace are made with perfect quality, but in three audio tracks, the music was louder than the instructor's voice";
• specific data — time frames, results, limitations. For example, "I bought the Xiaomi Redmi Note 14 Pro in May 2025, and after a year of use, I realized that...";
• drawbacks — honest criticism, balanced assessment. You don’t need to make up problems with the product you are writing about, but if you noticed downsides during use/testing — detail them;
• mistakes — incorrectly installed a program, used the wrong tool, made a mistake with the supplier, etc. When you learn to tell about mistakes, the ways to solve them, and the insights gained, you will not only technically comply with E-E-A-T but also gain greater audience loyalty.

It seems clear, but the question remains — how to showcase experience on the website for company owners or web investors? Their task is to establish a system for obtaining real experience from knowledge bearers.

A writer does not necessarily have to be a subject matter expert but must be a "documentarian" — a person who can extract, structure, and convey someone else's experience. For example, if you have a service station, let your writer conduct a 10-minute interview with your mechanic or draft a list of questions for the mechanic to dictate answers via voice messages in their free time. If you are engaged in website reselling, find a passionate author who loves fixing cars in their spare time to improve existing content and add new. The result should be not general phrases but specific terms, subjective feelings, and real photos.

Expertise — the opportunity to showcase your knowledge and qualifications

If experience can be had by anyone, expertise requires formal or informal knowledge in the field. However, the requirements here differ depending on the seriousness of the topic. For medical, legal, and financial websites, formal qualifications are mandatory; for others, deep immersion in the topic, understanding of specific terms and nuances, and the aforementioned practical experience are sufficient.

To demonstrate expertise on the website, it is worth using:

• full biography — a separate page with a detailed account of the person. It should reflect academic education or completed professional courses, publications on authoritative platforms, links to profiles on professional social networks such as LinkedIn, GitHub, Behance, ResearchGate, Academia.edu;
• short biography — each article should have a real author (not "site editorial," but a specific person). The author's bio should include their name and surname, photo, why they are competent in the topic, links to profiles on social networks and/or professional platforms;
• in-depth content — covering the topic from all angles, answering specific questions from the target audience, correct technical terminology with clear explanations. If previously it was possible to write dozens of articles on identical topics, even "watering" each one to increase volume, now one material is needed that fully reveals the topic;   
• links to primary sources — show that your content is based on verified facts, not just the author's fabrications or AI hallucinations;
• topical authority — deep coverage of one niche is one of the strongest signals of expertise. Build a content plan based on clusters; for example, if reviewing content management systems, first cover the WordPress cluster (settings, plugins, templates), then move on to Shopify, and so on;
• content updates — outdated information undermines the image of an expert. Regularly review articles, update data, and add a note "Updated: [month/year]".

My website on WordPress with the free version of Rank Math SEO — a plugin for search optimization that automatically transmits the update date (dateModified field) in the JSON-LD markup of the page. All other popular plugins, including Yoast SEO, AIOSEO, and SEOPress, also automatically add the last modified date to the JSON-LD code.

And you can check this through the page code: go to your article, right-click anywhere → "View Page Source," and find the line with dateModified. You will see the date and time that algorithms rely on when assessing content freshness. Or use Google Search Console: URL Inspection ("Check URL") → View Crawled Page ("View Indexed Page").

In addition to regular updates, pay attention to the authors you work with. Google forms a Knowledge Graph — a knowledge graph that links authors with specific topics and fields. For example, Bohdana Haivoronska is known as a specialist in journalism and content marketing; accordingly, her articles on these topics on the Cityhost site will rank better than anonymous texts. AI algorithms that generate answers directly in search also prefer sources with a high level of verified expertise. So there are reasons to believe that Bohdana's recognition in the Knowledge Graph helps Cityhost appear in AI system responses.

To check if artificial intelligence knows about your author, go to Google AI Mode and enter their name and surname. To check the connection with your site — add its name.

Bohdana Haivoronska, content marketer at Cityhost.ua, explains:

"Topics such as 'creating and managing websites,' 'marketing,' 'hosting and domains' do not require authors to have specialized education. However, we still pay great attention to the expertise of authors. For example, Viktoriya Popova has a journalism degree and is the editor of the Collaborator.pro blog; Serhiy Kuklin graduated from SEO courses and creates and promotes websites; Andriy Zarovynskyi is the head of the technical support team at Cityhost; Yuliya Gerasymenko is a professional content marketer working in the IT company UIT. This allows us not only to technically meet E-E-A-T requirements but primarily to provide useful unique content with a deep understanding of the topic."

Authoritativeness — building a recognized source of information in your niche

In 2026, this component of E-E-A-T plays an even more important role than before. If your web resource and authors are mentioned outside the site, then it is a reliable source of information not only for search engines but also for artificial intelligence systems.

You can build authoritativeness through the following methods:

• quality backlinks — one backlink from an authoritative resource in the niche weighs more than dozens of links from spam directories;
• unrelated mentions — Google is getting better at understanding when your site is mentioned without a hyperlink. Thus, publications in the media, reviews, podcasts, citations on social networks play an important role in building an authoritative source;
• guest posts — a classic way to build authoritativeness that remains relevant to this day. But only if these publications have real editorial standards and do not just exist to sell backlinks;
• original data — add your own statistics, surveys, research to your articles. As I mentioned earlier: if previously websites were afraid to link to other web resources, now they do it to demonstrate transparency, which is a component of Trustworthiness. So with unique content, you can get mentions without additional effort.

Sounds like link building methods, doesn’t it? In fact, it is, because Link Building, despite all the rumors, has not died but transformed. According to a study of 1,000,000 keywords conducted by Ahrefs in January 2025, the number of backlinks positively correlates with ranking in the top 20 search results. Thus, links from authoritative web resources remain important for search engines and artificial intelligence, but the requirements for them are increasing.

Now, not only direct links but also brand mentions on quality platforms, even without a clickable link, have become significant. And the requirements for backlinks have become even stricter: links from thematic resources provide a great boost, while mass purchases on junk sites yield no results and may attract the attention of the SpamBrain algorithm.

Also read: Guest posts: how to get quality backlinks without penalties through outreach in 2026

Trustworthiness — a key component of E-E-A-T

The trustworthiness of a site is an assessment of its safety, accuracy, and transparency. It remains a key component of the entire E-E-A-T concept: if your online store is stealing payment data or the company's site lacks legal information, then everything else will not help. And this is directly confirmed by the Search Quality Rater Guidelines:

"Trust is the most important member of the E-E-A-T family, as unreliable pages have low E-E-A-T, regardless of how experienced, expert, or authoritative they may seem."

To confirm the trustworthiness of a site, check for the presence of:

• an "About Us" page — clear, genuine, up-to-date information about the site owner and team;
• a "Contact" page — a current email or contact form is a basic signal of trust according to SQRG;
• privacy policy — is mandatory if you collect user data. This applies not only to online stores or companies, as blog owners also collect contacts through subscription and feedback forms;
• information about commercial relationships — important for sites that add affiliate links or sponsored content;
• real reviews — add a form for customers to leave feedback about your products and/or services. However, in March 2026, Google intensified the fight against self-citation, so it is also important to have reviews on third-party platforms like Trustpilot, Google Business Profile, etc.;
• HTTPS connection — obtaining an SSL certificate can be done in minutes. Moreover, hosting providers offer to do this immediately upon registration; for example, Cityhost allows you to buy reliable cheap hosting with free SSL, regardless of the plan;
• Schema markup — structured data (Organization, Person, Article) help Google understand the site itself, individual pages, the company, and authors, significantly enhancing the trustworthiness of the entire brand. Be sure to check the sameAs property, which allows AI to match your identity through LinkedIn, Wikidata, and other profiles.

Pay special attention to disclosing commercial relationships. Many sites ignore this point, which violates Article 9 of the Law of Ukraine "On Advertising": if you receive a commission for sales, you must inform readers about it. And Google, while not officially highlighting this as a direct technical ranking factor, considers the absence of disclosure to undermine Trustworthiness, which indirectly affects the quality assessment of the site.

You can add information about the presence of affiliate links on the site through reusable blocks in the Gutenberg editor or specialized plugins like WP Affiliate Disclosure, Disclaimify, Ad Inserter. I use a different method — the WPCode plugin. After installing it, go to Code Snippets → Add Snippet → Add Your Custom Code → Text Snippet, and insert simple text as shown in the screenshot above.

Now you need to scroll down and choose the method of adding this block. If there are affiliate links on all pages of the site, then choose Auto Insert; if only on some — Shortcode. In the second case, copy the shortcode and insert it at the beginning or after the text.

How to build a website in YMYL without the risk of demotion

The "Your Money or Your Life" niches remain areas of the highest vigilance for search engines. Especially with the habit of many people to seek advice online when facing health or financial issues. Thus, Google bears a moral responsibility for the quality of results in such topics, and the requirements here are much higher.

However, the question arises: how to manage YMYL web resources according to E-E-A-T requirements without formal qualifications? A doctor after a 12-24 hour shift in the hospital is unlikely to write articles for a site. And one experience alone will not help — expertise takes precedence.

Therefore, other optimization methods for YMYL sites under E-E-A-T should be applied:

• declaring the role — clearly indicate that your article is a personal experience or informational overview, not professional advice. To display a disclaimer on a WordPress site, you can also use the WPCode plugin, as I provided above for affiliate links;
• involving experts — conduct interviews with specialists and embed their quotes in the material or invite experts to review articles before publication, and indicate this in the text. Look at Investopedia, Healthline, and other authoritative YMYL resources: each material has an author, a doctor who verified the information, and the date of verification;
• seeking recommendations — for YMYL, it is especially important that authoritative sources in the niche mention your site. Reach out to professional associations, industry publications, and expert communities to request mentions or recommendations for your resource;
• checking sources — you must add links to other web resources, but be sure to verify their reliability. These should be peer-reviewed scientific studies, official resources from government institutions, and authoritative medical or financial organizations;
• content relevance — medical and financial recommendations quickly become outdated, so every 30-90 days and after significant changes in the niche, update the information in articles.

And separately — an important clarification regarding the boundaries of YMYL. A site may not be purely medical, but some of its clusters still fall under this classification. For example, my site about mobile applications primarily contains 80-90% materials about personal experiences using specific applications, considering mental and physical health.

However, some general articles, such as those about meditation or home workouts, touch on YMYL. I do not shy away from these topics, but I clearly indicate that the article is solely my personal experience, not medical advice. If you plan to give direct advice — take the time to find an expert with formal qualifications. This will not only help comply with E-E-A-T but also safeguard your readers' health.

When considering E-E-A-T as a whole, it is not just an SEO checkbox and not a set of technical tricks. It is a check to see if your site is indeed the best source on a specific topic for a specific person. If you manage to combine all components of the concept in each material, your site will become a reliable source of information that will occupy the highest positions in both search results and AI responses.