Google is obsessed. Not with keywords, or backlinks, or how many times you’ve used a specific H2 tag—though that stuff still matters in the background. They are obsessed with a specific trait. This trait is E-E-A-T.
If you’ve been in the SEO world for more than five minutes, you know the acronym. Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. It’s a mouthful. Honestly, it sounds like something a corporate consultant dreamed up during a Tuesday morning powerpoint session. But for Google’s Search Quality Raters, it’s the bible.
Here is the thing about E-E-A-T. It’s not a ranking factor you can measure with a tool. You can’t go to Ahrefs or Semrush and see an "E-E-A-T score" out of 100. It doesn't work like that. It’s more of a vibe check. A massive, algorithmic vibe check that determines if your content belongs on the first page of Search or the high-velocity feed of Google Discover.
Discover is a different beast entirely. While Search is about answering a question, Discover is about satisfying an interest before the user even asks. It’s proactive. To get there, your content needs to scream "I know what I’m talking about" louder than everyone else.
What E-E-A-T actually looks like in 2026
Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines (all 170+ pages of them) make it clear: Trust is at the center of the universe. If your site looks sketchy, you’re done.
Let’s look at the "Experience" part—the newest "E" added back in 2022. It changed the game. Before, you just needed to be an expert. Now? You need to have actually done the thing. If you’re writing a review of a new EV truck, Google wants to see that you actually sat in the driver’s seat. They want original photos. They want mentions of how the steering felt on a rainy Tuesday in Seattle.
If you just summarize other reviews, you’re dead in the water.
Lily Ray, a massive name in the SEO world, has been beating this drum for years. She’s shown time and again through her data analysis that sites lacking clear authorship or firsthand experience get absolutely crushed during Core Updates. It’s brutal. But it makes sense. Why would Google serve a "Top 10 Laptops" list written by someone who has never touched the hardware when they could serve a video from a tech creator who spent three weeks testing the battery life?
The Discover trap and why "Interest" isn't enough
Google Discover is a fickle friend. One day you have 50,000 visitors, the next day you have zero.
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Discover relies heavily on the E-E-A-T trait because it’s a recommendation engine. It’s like TikTok but for articles. If Google recommends a health article that gives dangerous advice, that’s a PR nightmare for them. So, for "Your Money or Your Life" (YMYL) topics—finance, health, safety—the bar is impossibly high.
To rank in Discover, your content needs a high "click-through rate" (CTR) and a low "bounce rate." But it also needs a hook. Something that feels timely. If you’re writing about a trait that ranks, you have to realize that Discover loves entities.
Entities are people, places, or things Google recognizes. If your article is about a person with a massive digital footprint, or a brand with high "Authoritativeness," you’re more likely to pop up in someone’s feed. This is why "Personal Branding" has become an SEO strategy. It’s not just vanity. It’s about building an entity that Google trusts.
The "Trust" factor: More than just an About page
Trust is the most important part of the E-E-A-T umbrella. Basically, if the other three are the legs of a chair, Trust is the seat. Without it, the chair is useless.
How do you build trust?
- Clear contact information.
- A physical address (yes, really).
- Rigorous fact-checking.
- Citing your sources properly.
- Showing who wrote the piece.
Don't just put "Admin" as the author. That is an SEO death wish. Use a real name. Link to a real LinkedIn profile. Show a history of that person writing about that specific topic. If a cardiologist writes about heart health, Google loves it. If a hobbyist gardener writes about heart health, Google hides it.
Nuance is everything.
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I’ve seen sites lose 80% of their traffic because they used AI to churn out medical advice without a human review. Google’s algorithms are getting scarily good at detecting the "hallucinations" or generic patterns associated with unedited AI content. They want the human trait of accountability. They want to know there’s a throat to choke if the information is wrong.
Technical traits that support E-E-A-T
You can’t just be a nice person who knows things; you need the technical infrastructure to prove it. This is where Schema Markup comes in.
Schema is a way of talking to Google in its own language (JSON-LD). It’s like a digital ID card for your content. By using Author schema, Organization schema, and ReviewedBy schema, you are explicitly telling the bot: "Hey, this person wrote this, and this expert checked it."
It’s about connecting the dots.
Google’s Knowledge Graph is a massive web of billions of facts about the world. Your goal is to get your brand or your name into that graph. When Google connects your name to a specific topic—say, "Organic Gardening"—it starts to see you as an authority. Once you reach that stage, ranking becomes significantly easier. You stop fighting for every keyword and start "owning" the topic.
Misconceptions about ranking on Google
A lot of people think long-form content is a "trait" that ranks. "Just write 3,000 words," they say.
Honestly? That’s terrible advice.
Google doesn't count words. It counts "value." If you can answer a user’s question in 300 words, and you do it better than someone who rambled for 3,000, you will win. The "long-form is better" myth comes from the fact that longer articles often cover more sub-topics (latent semantic indexing), which naturally attracts more keywords. But fluff is a penalty in its own right.
Another misconception is that backlinks are the only way to build authority. While links are still the "votes" of the internet, the quality of the link matters more than the quantity. One link from the New York Times is worth more than 10,000 links from a "link farm" in a basement somewhere.
Google looks at the "reputation" of the linking site. If an authoritative site in your niche links to you, they are essentially "vouching" for your E-E-A-T.
The Discover "Freshness" requirement
If you want to appear in Google Discover, you have to be fast.
Discover favors "fresh" content. This doesn't mean you have to be a news site, but it means you have to have a "take" on something happening right now. Evergreen content (stuff that is always relevant) can show up in Discover, but it’s usually because of a surge in interest. For example, an old article about "How to Vote" will suddenly spike in Discover every four years.
But for most of us, Discover success comes from "News-Adjacent" content.
If there’s a new update in the tech world, don't just report the news. Provide the "Experience" and "Expertise." Explain how that update will actually affect the user’s life. That unique perspective is the specific trait that triggers the Discover algorithm to say, "People need to see this."
Why the "Human" element is the ultimate trait
We’re living in a sea of AI-generated noise. Every day, millions of perfectly grammatical, perfectly boring articles are published.
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Google knows this.
The trait that ranks now—and will rank even higher in the future—is "Personal Voice." This is the "Experience" part of E-E-A-T on steroids. It’s the use of "I" and "me." It’s the admission of mistakes. It’s the "I tried this and it failed, here is why" narrative.
Algorithms struggle to fake genuine human failure and the lessons learned from it.
If you want to dominate Search and Discover, stop trying to sound like an encyclopedia. Encyclopedias are commodities. Be a person. Be an expert who has actually bled, sweated, or cheered over the topic at hand.
Actionable insights for your content strategy
If you're looking to improve your site's standing with Google, start with these specific moves. Don't try to do everything at once. Pick one and do it well.
- Audit your author bios. Move beyond "Staff Writer." Every person writing for you should have a bio that lists their credentials, links to their social media, and highlights their experience in the niche.
- Add "Firsthand" evidence. If you’re writing a guide, include photos you took yourself. Use specific anecdotes. Instead of saying "Many people find this difficult," say "When I tried this last year, I struggled with X, so I solved it by doing Y."
- Implement Person Schema. Use a plugin or custom code to ensure your author pages are correctly marked up with JSON-LD. This helps Google connect the author entity to the content.
- Focus on Trust signals. Ensure your site has a clear Privacy Policy, Terms of Service, and a "Contact Us" page that actually works. If you're a business, link to your Better Business Bureau profile or other third-party review sites.
- Clean up your YMYL content. If you have old articles about health or money that haven't been updated in two years, either update them with current expert citations or delete them. Outdated YMYL content drags down the E-E-A-T of your entire domain.
- Prioritize original reporting. Even if you aren't a news site, find a way to add a new data point or a new perspective to a conversation. Google rewards the "Information Gain" of an article—the new stuff you’re adding to the internet that wasn't there before.
The landscape is shifting away from "SEO writing" and toward "Authoritative Publishing." The more you lean into your actual expertise and provide verifiable trust, the more Google will reward you with that sweet, sweet traffic. There are no shortcuts anymore. Just the long, rewarding road of actually knowing what you're talking about.