E-E-A-T: what it is and how to show authorship, dates and an About page on your site

E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust: the criteria Google's quality raters use to judge a page. According to Google, it is not a direct ranking factor. What you can control is making it clear who wrote the page, when it was published or updated, and who is behind the site.

To check it on your own site: AI visibility audit

What is E-E-A-T?

E-E-A-T is the framework Google's search quality rater guidelines use to judge whether a page and its author can be trusted. The guidelines are a public document Google gives to the people who review its results; the current version is dated 11 September 20251. This is what each letter asks, with examples from the guidelines themselves:

The guidelines say trust is the most important member of the family: an untrustworthy page has low E-E-A-T however much experience or authority it appears to have. The other three letters help to assess it.

The first E is the newest. Google added it on 15 December 2022, when the old E-A-T gained an E for experience: whether the content shows it was produced with some degree of experience, such as having actually used the product or visited the place2.

For a machine, almost none of this can be checked directly. What it can read are the signals that go with it: a byline, a date, a page that says who is behind the site. That is why these signals form part of credibility in AI search optimisation, alongside sourced data and citations.

Is E-E-A-T a ranking factor?

Not as such. Google puts it this way in its helpful content guidance: E-E-A-T itself is not a specific ranking factor, but its systems use a mix of factors that can identify content with good E-E-A-T3. For topics that could affect people's health, financial stability or safety (known as YMYL, Your Money or Your Life), those systems give such content even more weight.

On raters, Google is just as clear: they have no control over how pages rank, and their data is not used directly in the ranking algorithms. In Google's words, they serve like the feedback cards a restaurant asks diners to fill in: to tell whether the systems are working3. The 2022 post said the same: the guidelines do not directly influence ranking2.

The practical upshot is that there is no "E-E-A-T" box to tick. There are specific signals that make it obvious who you are and why you know what you are talking about, and Google asks for them explicitly.

Who, how and why: Google's test

The helpful content guidance suggests assessing every page with three questions3:

• Who created it. Is it self-evident to visitors who wrote it? Is there a byline where readers would expect one? Does the byline lead to more information about the author and the topics they write about? Google encourages accurate authorship information and warns that inventing profiles, with AI-generated photos, fake names or credentials that do not exist, is deceptive and makes the page untrustworthy.
• How it was created. For a product review, how many products were tested, with what results and how. If automation or AI was used substantially, it is worth saying so when readers might wonder how the content was made.
• Why it was created. To help people, not to attract search visits. According to Google, this is perhaps the most important question.

Author bylines and author pages

The byline is the minimum answer to "who". A good byline has the full name, the role or relationship to the topic, and a link to the author's page. The author page fills in the rest:

1. Name and a real photo, or no photo at all. Never an invented portrait.
2. What they do and for how long, with specifics: years in the trade, projects, qualifications.
3. Which topics they write about on the site.
4. Links to their public profiles, such as LinkedIn, or to work published elsewhere.
5. The list of articles they have written.

So that a search engine can connect the byline to the person, Google recommends marking up the author with Article or BlogPosting structured data. Its best practices: include every author shown on the page, use the Person type for people and Organization for organisations, put only the name in name (no job title or honorific), and add url or sameAs pointing to pages that identify the author4. A complete example for an article:

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "BlogPosting",
  "headline": "How to choose a condensing boiler",
  "datePublished": "2026-03-12T09:00:00+00:00",
  "dateModified": "2026-10-07T10:30:00+01:00",
  "author": [{
    "@type": "Person",
    "name": "Laura Green",
    "jobTitle": "Chartered building services engineer",
    "url": "https://example.com/authors/laura-green/",
    "sameAs": ["https://www.linkedin.com/in/example-laura-green/"]
  }],
  "publisher": {
    "@type": "Organization",
    "name": "Example Heating",
    "url": "https://example.com/"
  }
}

Three details in the example that often go wrong: the job title goes in jobTitle, not inside name; dates carry a time zone (+00:00 in winter and +01:00 in summer in the UK); and the author in the markup is the same person shown in the byline. The guide to structured data explains how to validate JSON-LD. A warning from Google itself: structured data is not a requirement for its generative AI search, and there is no special markup to add for it5. Markup helps identify the author; it does not replace the visible byline.

Visible, marked-up dates

Google has a whole page on how to show an article's date. Its recommendations6:

• A visible, labelled date, such as "Published" or "Updated", in a prominent place.
• The same date in the markup, with datePublished and, if it changed, dateModified.
• A time zone when you give the time, allowing for daylight saving.
• Consistency between the date readers see and the one in the markup.
• No future dates, and not the date of the event the article covers instead of the page's own date.

Google adds that it does not rely on a single factor to work out when a page was published or updated, because all of them can be wrong, and that it combines several6. That is why changing the date without changing the text achieves nothing: its helpful content guidance flags it as a warning sign, phrased as a question, if you change the date to make a page seem fresh when the content has not substantially changed3.

An honest practice is to keep a change log at the foot of the page: what changed and when. That way the update date has a visible reason.

The About page

The rater guidelines ask that it be clear who is responsible for the site and who created the content on each page, and note that most websites have "contact us" or "about us" pages with that information1. Among the sources for assessing E-E-A-T, the first they cite is what the website or the content creator says about themselves, and they suggest that page or the author's profile as the starting point.

A useful About page answers what a stranger would want to know before trusting you:

• Who is behind it: company, registered name and named people.
• How long it has been operating and in what, with verifiable facts.
• Where it is and how to get in touch: address, phone or email.
• For shops, customer service, payment, exchange and returns information, which the guidelines specifically cite as part of trust.
• What others say: press mentions, awards or reviews, linked to their source.

Experience indicators

Experience is the easiest letter to demonstrate and the easiest to forget. It shows when the text contains something only someone who has done the work could write: a client case with its outcome, your own photo of the process, the method behind a test, a figure from your own business. Google uses this as an example in its guide to generative AI search: a first-hand review offers a perspective of its own, while a summary of what has already been published only repeats what is on other sites5.

What SmoothSeen checks

A declaration of interest: this blog belongs to SmoothSeen, a web audit tool that measures visibility in search engines and AI assistants. In the Credibility block of its AI visibility analysis, it checks these signals:

These are presence checks: SmoothSeen can see that there is a byline, not whether the author knows the subject. Nor does it expect a byline on a product page, because that is not what one is for. Domain authority, which it also checks, is the part you cannot fix by editing a page. Sourced data and citations, the other half of credibility, are covered in how to get cited by AI, and the research behind them in what GEO is.

Frequently asked questions

Do articles need an author?

There is no technical obligation, but Google recommends adding a byline wherever readers would expect one, and having it lead to more information about the author. It is the most direct way to answer the "who" question in its helpful content guidance. On a product page or a services page nobody expects a byline; on an article, a guide or a review, they do.

Does changing the date improve rankings?

No, not if the content stays the same. Google combines several signals to work out when a page was published or updated, and its helpful content guidance flags changing dates to make pages seem fresh without substantial changes as a questionable practice. Update the date when you revise data, sources or sections, and record what you changed in a visible change log.

What should an About page include?

Who is behind the site, with company and personal names; how long and in what field it has been operating; where it is and how to get in touch; and, if you sell online, customer service, payment and returns information. Google's rater guidelines suggest it as the starting point for judging whether a site is trustworthy, so it should answer with facts rather than slogans.

Does Person markup help you appear in AI answers?

It helps identify the author, but it is not a requirement. Google says structured data is not needed for its generative AI search and that there is no special markup for it. Its article documentation does recommend marking up the author with Person, their name and a link to their page. What matters is that the markup matches the visible byline.

What to do next

Open your three most visited articles and check that each one shows an author linked to their page, a publication or update date, and a link to your About page. Then work through the other credibility signals in the guide to AI search optimisation.