E-E-A-T Checklist: How to Prove Who Wrote Your Page and Why to Trust It

E-E-A-T checklist: can a stranger tell who wrote this?

Picture a nice-looking blog for an agency that serves health practices. Two posts. A smiling photo of the founder at the top of each one.

You click his face. Nothing happens. No name to click, no bio, no page about him.

So who is he? Why trust what he says about running a practice? You give up and hit the back button.

That is how a stranger checks a page. Google checks it the same way. It has never met you either.

This E-E-A-T checklist (people also type it as EEAT) fixes that. E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust.

It is not a score. There is no plugin for it. Google's own guidance says E-E-A-T itself is not a specific ranking factor.

What Google's systems look for is proof a stranger can check: who wrote this, how they know, and why the page exists.

Our checklist for those three questions is the Author Proof Check. Twelve checks, about fifteen minutes a page, and a prompt at the end that runs it for you.

Proof beats polish. Every time.

What does E-E-A-T stand for? Four words for what a stranger checks

E-E-A-T is four words for the proof a reader looks for before they believe a page.

Experience means you did the thing. Your own cases, your own numbers, and how you reached your view in real life.

Expertise means you know the subject. It shows up in the details a beginner would not know to mention.

Authoritativeness means other people point to you. Credentials, profiles and mentions that live outside your own site.

Trust means the page is accurate, honest and safe. Google calls it the most important of the four. The other three feed it.

Google added the first E, for experience, at the end of 2022. It wanted to tell two kinds of pages apart: ones by people who did the thing, and ones pieced together from other pages.

Which letter matters most for a small firm? Experience.

A competitor can copy your layout and your headlines. They cannot copy your numbers.

Is E-E-A-T a ranking factor? Not by itself, and raters do not rank you

E-E-A-T is not a ranking factor by itself. Google says its systems use a mix of signals to find content that shows it.

Those systems give it even more weight on topics that could hurt someone's health, money or safety. Google calls these Your Money or Your Life topics, or YMYL.

Then there are the raters. Search quality raters are people who score results against a public set of guidelines. Google says they have no control over how pages rank.

Here the SEO world and Google disagree. Many SEO agencies say a human review can hold a YMYL site back, or push it to page two, when no real experts show up.

Google says rater data is not used directly in ranking. Nobody outside Google can prove either side.

Our decision rule: build every page as if a careful person will check it. Google's systems look for the same proof. So does every buyer who reads you before they call.

Either way, the work is the same: show real proof.

Run the Author Proof Check: three questions, twelve checks

The Author Proof Check is our twelve-point test of whether a stranger can verify who wrote a page, how they know, and why it exists.

Four checks sit under each of three questions: who, how and why. Google asks site owners to judge their own pages by the same three questions.

Run it on three pages first. Pick the ones a buyer reads before they call, not your whole blog.

Step 1: open the page like a stranger. Use a private browser window. Start a timer.

Step 2: find the author in about seven seconds. That is our rule of thumb for a reader who is not trying hard.

No name you can click by then? Count it as a fail.

Step 3: score all twelve checks. One point each. Fix every failed check in the Who group first.

Why the Who group first? Without a real person, the rest of the proof has no owner. A great number from nobody is still from nobody.

Step 4: check every new post before it goes live. The prompt at the end does the scoring for you.

Who wrote this? Put a real, checkable person on every post

Every post needs a real name in the byline and a short bio box. Google asks whether a byline leads to more about the author. Yours should.

The bio box is small. A photo, one or two lines of real experience, and links to the author page and LinkedIn.

What happens when the person is fake? In November 2023, the news site Futurism reported that Sports Illustrated had run product reviews under writers who did not seem to exist.

One writer's headshot was for sale on a site that sells AI-made faces. After reporters asked questions, the profiles disappeared from the site.

The magazine said an outside company had made the articles and that it had ended the partnership. The magazine had decades of good name behind it. That month, the story was a writer who never existed.

Google now names this directly. Making up creator profiles, with AI headshots, invented names or false credentials, counts as deception. Deception makes a page untrustworthy.

AI makes faking cheap. Anyone can make a fake face, a fake name and a fake site in an afternoon.

So a real person who is easy to check is worth more than ever. Fakes got cheap. Real proof did not.

Build an author page that links both ways

An author page is one page about one writer that lists every post they wrote. Each post links to it, and it links back to each post.

That two-way link is the point. The post says who wrote it. The author page shows that person is real and what else they wrote.

Put five things on it: credentials, background, why they can write on this topic, links to LinkedIn and other profiles, and places they were quoted or spoke.

For example, one personal-development blog had ten years of posts and an author page. The page listed every post, which was good.

The rest was the theme's default template. No credentials, no background, no links out. A page that says nothing proves nothing.

Several writers? Add an author index: one page with a short profile for each writer, linking to their author pages.

Then add markup, hidden labels that tell Google what a page is. Google's Article markup guide has an author field that can link to the author page. The author page itself can use ProfilePage markup to describe a Person.

Want Google to connect that person to profiles across the web? That is the job of a knowledge panel home base.

Google's current rules for bylines, markup and dates sit in the dated box below.

How do you know? Show proof a competitor cannot copy

The How group checks your evidence. Your own numbers, screenshots and cases, each with a date, are the E for experience in action.

Link a source for every outside number. A number with no source is a claim. A number with a source is something the reader can check.

Put a visible date on the page, labeled Published or Last updated. Google asks for a visible date, and so does any reader who wonders if the advice is stale.

Used AI to help write it? That is allowed. Google's guidance on generative AI says it can help with research and structure.

Churning out many pages that add nothing breaks Google's spam policies. So check every AI draft for facts. Say how the piece was made when a reader would wonder.

Think you have no proof? You do. It is in your own work, and we cover how to collect it in where content actually comes from.

Then stack it where a reader can see it. Our guide to building a proof stack shows how.

Opinions are cheap. Receipts are not.

Why does this page exist? Answer before you sell

Google says the why question is perhaps the most important one. The right answer is that the page exists to help the person reading it.

So the answer comes before the pitch. A reader who never hires you should still leave with something they can use.

Show real contact details too. A firm you cannot reach is a firm you cannot trust.

You may think YMYL is only for doctors and banks. It is not.

A consultant's page tells an owner how to spend ad money or which software to bet on. That is advice about money.

Nobody outside Google can see whether it treats your page as YMYL. Assume it might. The checklist costs you nothing either way.

How to fail an E-E-A-T check in four easy steps:

1. Sign every post "Admin." Mystery is a brand.

2. Use a stock photo for the founder. Nobody will spot the same face on a dentist's site.

3. Leave the author page as the theme's default. Blank pages build character.

4. Pitch the service in the first line. Never answer the question.

Calling that expertise is bullshit. It is a logo with a blog attached.

Trust is built from many small signals. We break them down in the four sources of trust.

Guest authors: cite them, tie them in, and watch for overlap

Guest experts help, most of all on health and money topics. But only if a stranger can check them too.

Give each guest a byline and an author page. No page for them? Link to their site and LinkedIn inside the post.

Ask each guest to link to the post from their own site. That ties the person to the post from their side as well.

Then watch for overlap. Guests tend to write about what you already cover.

Two pages on one topic can split the ranking, so neither does well. SEO people call this cannibalization.

Our rule: when one of your top pages drops, check the newest guest posts for the same topic first.

For example, one software company for therapists was getting about seven guest articles a month from industry experts. Strong proof. It also meant seven new chances a month to repeat a topic it already covered.

Score your page with AI: the copy-paste prompt

Paste the prompt below into your preferred AI, along with the page text or its URL. It scores all twelve checks and tells you what to fix first.

It never invents a credential, a number or a date. If it cannot see something, it asks you or marks it unknown.

Run it on every new post before it goes live. That is the whole automation: one paste, one score, one fix list.

Want a second pair of eyes on the result? Send it to us.

Run it this week

1. Pick your three most important pages. Run the prompt on each one.

2. Fix the Who group first: byline, bio box, author page, links both ways.

3. Add dates, sources and a line on how each page was made. Then run the prompt on every new post.

Once readers can see who wrote your pages, structure the blog itself. Start with how to structure a blog that ranks, or see what AI answer engines actually cite.

Remember the founder photo nobody could click? Give him a name, a page and a reason. Then the stranger stays.

Google will never shake your hand. So hand it proof.