The E-E-A-T audit checklist for 2026, and what not to pay for

An E-E-A-T audit checks whether a site gives readers, and the people Google pays to evaluate search quality, clear reasons to trust it: who wrote each page and why they are qualified, how the content was produced, why it exists, and what the rest of the web says about the publisher. Google states that "E-E-A-T itself isn't a specific ranking factor" and that, of experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trust, "trust is most important." So the audit is not about earning a score. It is about removing every reason a careful reader would have to doubt you.

What E-E-A-T is, in Google's words

E-E-A-T comes from Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines, the manual for the people who evaluate search results so Google can test changes to its systems. Google added "experience" in December 2022, turning E-A-T into E-E-A-T, and said then that trust sits at the center. The September 2025 edition added examples for rating AI Overviews and broadened the "Your Money or Your Life" category, the topics where bad information can cause real harm, to include civic information such as elections.

Two clarifications from Google prevent most E-E-A-T mistakes. Rater data "is not used directly in our ranking algorithms"; it is used to evaluate whether the systems are working. And the systems use "a mix of factors that can identify content with good E-E-A-T", not a single signal you can optimize. The practical reading is that E-E-A-T describes the destination, and the checklist below describes the road.

The checklist

Who: authorship and ownership

• Every article carries a byline where a reader would expect one, linking to an author page that explains the person's relevant experience. Our article on named authors and AI citation covers the setup in detail.
• Health, legal, and financial content names a qualified reviewer as well as the writer.
• An About page names the people and the company behind the site, with a real address and contact route.
• No invented experts. Google calls fabricated creator profiles, including AI-generated headshots and false credentials, "a form of deception."

How: the way content is produced

• Claims cite primary sources: the statute, the study, the official documentation, rather than another blog summarizing it.
• If automation or AI drafting is part of the process, the site says so where readers would reasonably expect to know. Google's guidance asks whether that is "self-evident to visitors."
• An editorial policy explains how content is researched, reviewed, and updated, and a corrections policy explains how errors are fixed.
• Pages show when they were published and last updated, and the updated date only changes when the content does.
• First-hand experience is shown, not claimed: original photos, real case examples, test results, or data you collected.

Why: the purpose of each page

• Each page would be worth publishing even if search engines did not exist. Google's test is whether content is made "primarily to help people" or "to attract search engine visits."
• Affiliate relationships, sponsorships, and paid placements are disclosed on the page.
• There are no pages that exist only to target a keyword variation with no new information, the pattern Google's helpful content guidance was built to demote.

Reputation: what others say

• Search for the brand and its key people as an outsider would: reviews, news coverage, complaints, professional registrations. Raters are instructed to research reputation this way.
• Licensing and professional registrations are verifiable from independent sources, such as a state bar or medical board listing.
• The organization is described consistently across its own site and third-party profiles, and its structured data links to those profiles.

Policy risk: the fastest way to lose trust

In March 2024 Google introduced three spam policies that target practices often sold as growth tactics: scaled content abuse, mass-producing pages mainly to rank; site reputation abuse, hosting third-party content to exploit a trusted domain; and expired domain abuse, buying an old domain to repurpose its reputation. Google says sites that violate its spam policies "may rank lower in results or not appear in results at all." Check that nothing on your site, including partner sections and programmatic pages, fits those descriptions.

Running the audit in an afternoon

You do not need to review every page. Most trust problems live in templates and in a handful of high-traffic pages, so sample deliberately:

1. List your page templates: home, about, service or product, article, location, and any programmatic or partner sections.
2. Pick your top 20 pages by traffic or revenue, plus two pages from every template, and open each one as a first-time visitor would.
3. For each page, answer the who, how, and why questions above in a spreadsheet, one row per page. Write down what is missing, not what is present.
4. Fix template-level gaps first, because one change to the article template can fix hundreds of bylines and dates at once.
5. Then fix the high-traffic pages individually: missing sources, stale figures, undisclosed affiliations.
6. Do the reputation searches last and keep the results, including screenshots of review profiles and directory listings. They become the baseline you compare against next quarter.

Repeat the exercise each quarter, or after any significant change to how content is produced, such as introducing AI drafting or a new freelance team. The point of a recurring audit is to catch drift before a reader, or a core update, does.

What not to pay for

Several tools sell an "E-E-A-T score." Since Google says E-E-A-T is not a specific ranking factor and that rater data does not feed ranking directly, any single number is the vendor's own model of quality, with no way to check it against what Google does. The same applies to services that promise to "add E-E-A-T" by bolting author boxes onto pages with no real expert behind them. The checklist above costs nothing but attention, and every item on it is something a reader can see.

Why this matters for AI answers too

AI Overviews are built on Google Search, so whatever Google's systems learn about trustworthy sources carries into which pages they cite. Other assistants retrieve from their own indexes, but they face the same problem of choosing which sources to believe, and the visible trust signals on this checklist are the evidence available to any system that reads the page. For regulated professions, our pages for medical practices and law firms cover the review and disclosure requirements specific to each.

How SEO for AI Agents measures this

We do not produce an E-E-A-T score, for the same reason we advise against buying one: it cannot be tied to a published method. What we report are the checkable facts underneath. The JSON-LD validity check shows whether your Article and Organization structured data exists and is valid, including whether articles declare an author. The entity graph check shows whether your organization is linked to the identity profiles knowledge graphs resolve against, which is the machine-readable side of reputation.

Each finding shows the exact markup or link it is based on, so you can confirm it in your own page source. The rest of this checklist, such as editorial policies, reviewer credentials, and disclosures, is human judgment, and we would rather leave it to you with a clear list than pretend to score it. The glossary entries on E-E-A-T and YMYL have more background.