E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness — the qualities Google and AI systems use to judge whether a page deserves to be cited. You cannot mark up trust with a single tag, but you can send concrete signals that machines read: a real named author with verifiable credentials, sourced claims, transparent ownership, and corroboration from other reputable sites. In an era where AI answers synthesise from "trusted" sources, these signals increasingly decide whether your content is one of them.
AI models are trained to avoid amplifying low-quality or unverifiable information, so they lean toward sources that look accountable. Anonymous, unsourced pages are a risk they'd rather not take. Here is how to make your site the safe choice.
Show a real, credentialed author
The single clearest trust signal is a named human author with genuine expertise, not "Admin" or "The Team". Give every substantive article a visible byline, an author page that states relevant credentials and experience, and — where it fits — links to that person's professional profiles. This is what the first "E", Experience, is about: content that reads as though it was written by someone who has actually done the thing.
You can reinforce this for machines with author and Person markup in your structured data, connecting the article to a described entity. If you're not yet using JSON-LD, our structured data guide shows how to add it without breaking anything.
Back every claim with evidence
Trustworthiness is earned sentence by sentence. When you state a fact, a statistic, or a recommendation, show where it comes from — link to primary sources, cite the standard, name the study. AI systems corroborate claims across sources; a page that agrees with reputable references and shows its working is far more likely to be treated as reliable than one that asserts numbers from nowhere.
The same discipline improves accuracy for readers and protects you from the credibility hit of being wrong. Vague, unsourced superlatives ("the best", "everyone knows") are the opposite signal — they read as marketing, not expertise.
Make ownership and intent transparent
Authoritativeness and trust extend to the whole site, not just the article. Basic transparency pages — a real About page, contact details, clear ownership, and where relevant a privacy policy — tell both users and machines that a real, accountable organisation stands behind the content. Secure delivery matters too: a site served over HTTPS with valid certificates signals the baseline care that trustworthy sites take. These are small things individually, but their absence is a red flag.
Keep content current and corroborated
Expertise decays. A guide that was authoritative two years ago can become a liability if the facts have moved on, and AI systems increasingly prefer fresh sources for anything time-sensitive. Review and update your important pages, show a clear "last updated" date, and revise the substance rather than just the timestamp.
Finally, authority is partly conferred by others. Mentions, citations, and links from respected sites in your field raise how trustworthy your content looks to a model weighing which sources to synthesise. You build that by being genuinely useful and thorough — which also happens to be what earns you a place in ChatGPT, Gemini, and AI search results in the first place.
Curious how your site's trust and technical signals stack up? Run the CheckMy.site scanner to check the on-page and structural signals that AI systems use to decide whether to trust — and cite — your content.