EEAT is shorthand from Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines, the manual that human raters use to judge whether search results are good. The letters stand for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust. Most of what is written about it is aimed at websites and publishers. It applies to people too, and for a person the evidence is much more concrete than the acronym suggests.
One thing to clear up first: EEAT is not a score Google calculates and not a direct ranking factor you can turn up. It is a description of what Google's systems are built to reward, and the guidelines exist so raters can check whether those systems are doing their job. If your record demonstrates each letter in ways a machine can verify, the systems tend to agree with the raters.
Experience: first hand, in your own words
Experience means you have actually done the thing. For a person, the strongest evidence is first hand accounts that exist on other people's pages: a podcast interview where you explain how you built the company, a case study on a vendor's site, a talk recording. These are dated, transcribed, and attributed to you by someone else. A line on your own bio saying "20 years of experience" is a claim. An hour of you describing that experience to a host is evidence.
Expertise: the same subject, many times, from many places
Expertise is depth in a defined area. The signal is consistency: the same two or three topics appearing across your site, your talks, your interviews and your writing, over time. A person who has discussed pricing strategy on fourteen shows reads as an expert on pricing strategy. A person whose appearances cover whatever the host wanted to talk about reads as a generalist, however good each conversation was. Credentials help when they are specific and verifiable, which means stated plainly on your site and matching the institution's own records.
Authoritativeness: what other people say
Authority is reputation, and reputation is other people's pages. Hosts who booked you, outlets that quoted you, conferences that listed you, a company that names you on its leadership page, a Wikipedia or Wikidata entry that cites independent sources. The common thread is that none of it is under your control. This is the letter most personal brands neglect, because it cannot be written; it has to be earned and then collected. Collected matters: a hundred mentions that nobody has linked back to your record do less for you than twenty that have.
Trust: everything agrees, and you can be contacted
Trust is the one Google's guidelines call the most important, and for a person it comes down to consistency and accountability. The same name everywhere. The same photo. Dates and titles that match between your site, LinkedIn and anything else the machine can read. A real contact route. An accurate description of what you do, with no inflated numbers that a reader could check and find wanting. Trust is destroyed by small things: a bio that still lists a role you left, a profile under a variant name, two different birthplaces on two pages.
Where each letter is measured
It is worth being concrete about which pages each letter is read from, because it changes where you spend effort.
| Letter | Read mostly from | Your own site's role |
|---|---|---|
| Experience | Interviews, talks, case studies on other sites | Collecting and linking them, so they attach to you |
| Expertise | The spread of your subjects across every page about you | Stating the two or three subjects plainly, once |
| Authoritativeness | Other people's pages: hosts, outlets, bodies, Wikidata | Being the page those sources point at and agree with |
| Trust | Agreement between all of the above | Being the canonical statement everything else matches |
Only the fourth row is something your site does directly. The other three it supports.
What podcasts have to do with it
A single interview episode touches all four letters at once. It is first hand experience in your own words, it demonstrates expertise on a topic, it is authority because a host chose to platform you, and it is trust because it is a dated, public, third party record of what you said. No other kind of content does that as cheaply. Podcast appearances are the new press clippings covers how to collect them so they count. The catch is that it only counts if the machine can connect the episode to you, which means your exact name in the show notes, a link to your record, and the appearance listed on your own site.
What the raters are told to look for
The guidelines run to a couple of hundred pages, and the parts about people are specific enough to be useful. Raters are asked to look for who is responsible for a page and whether that person has the background to be trusted on the topic. They are told to search for information about the author elsewhere: reviews, references, news, what independent sources say. They are told that for topics affecting health, finances or safety, the bar is higher and the evidence has to be stronger. And they are told that a lack of information about the author is itself a negative signal on those topics.
Read that back as a person building a record and it is a list of instructions. Make it obvious who you are on every page you publish. Make sure a rater who searches your name finds independent pages that confirm what your page claims. If your subject touches money or health, expect your credentials to be checked against the institution and have them stated exactly.
Three people, three gaps
The pattern across the three is that nobody is missing everything. Each has one or two letters covered by their work and one or two that only collection and consistency can fix.
A checklist you can run in an afternoon
- Your home page states your role, company, education, location and work in plain sentences.
- Every profile uses the identical name form and the identical headshot.
- Every profile's website field points at your own domain.
- Your last ten appearances and articles are listed on your site with dates and links.
- Each of those third party pages uses your exact name.
- Your site carries Person schema with a sameAs list of every profile.
- Your credentials are stated specifically and match the issuing institution.
- There is a working contact address on your domain.
- No page about you, anywhere, still carries a role or detail that is out of date.
What does not help
Stuffing a bio with keywords. Listing awards nobody can verify. Buying placements on sites that exist to sell placements. AI generated bios that restate what is already online in slightly different words. Each of these is visible to the systems the guidelines describe, and each reads as the opposite of trust.