Free E-E-A-T Checker

What is E-E-A-T, and what can one page prove about it?

Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust are how Google describes content people can rely on. None of the four is a number, but most of them leave evidence on the page. Here is what that evidence is, which of it a checker can read, and what matters more when the page gives financial, legal or medical advice.

The four pillars

E-E-A-T began as E-A-T in Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines, the handbook Google gives the people it pays to rate search results. In December 2022 Google added a second E, for Experience. The four are easiest to hold apart as four questions a careful reader asks.

• Experience. Has the writer done the thing? A property manager describing an eviction they handled, an adviser describing what their clients asked in a market drop. Experience shows up in the prose, as specifics no one could have written from a search results page.
• Expertise. Does the writer know the subject? A credential, a licence, a job title, a body of work. On the page it shows up as a byline that leads somewhere and a bio that says what qualifies this person.
• Authoritativeness. Do others treat the writer or the site as a go-to source? That is mostly decided off the page, by who links to and cites you, but the page contributes by citing its own sources well and by making its author identifiable as one entity.
• Trust. Is the page accurate, honest and safe to rely on? Google's own guidance calls trust the most important of the four, and says the others contribute to it. Dates, citations, a named author and a way to reach the business are its visible parts.

Where E-E-A-T comes from: the Quality Rater Guidelines

The rater guidelines are a long public document, and E-E-A-T is one of the lenses raters use to judge page quality. Two facts about the raters matter for anyone reading an "E-E-A-T score" on a tool. Google says search raters have no control over how pages rank, and that rater data is not used directly in its ranking algorithms. Their ratings are used to test whether Google's systems are returning good results.

That is why Google describes E-E-A-T carefully. Its Search Central guidance says E-E-A-T itself is not a specific ranking factor, but that its systems use a mix of factors that can identify content with good E-E-A-T. There is no E-E-A-T field in Search Console, and no tool can read the number Google holds, because there isn't one. What a tool can do is check whether the signals a rater is told to look for are present and machine-readable. That is the honest job of this checker, and the reason its result is called Verand's score.

YMYL: why the bar is higher for some pages

Google groups topics that could significantly affect a person's health, financial stability or safety as "Your Money or Your Life". Its guidance says its systems give even more weight to strong E-E-A-T on those topics. A recipe with no author is a small problem. An article on rolling over a 401(k), on what to do after a car accident, or on a drug interaction, with no author, no credentials and no sources, is exactly the page raters are told to rate low.

For a firm in a regulated field the stakes run the other way too. The same page is read by a compliance officer and, sometimes, a regulator. Evidence of who wrote it and what it rests on is not decoration there; it is part of what makes the content defensible. That is the audience this checker was built for, which is why its citation check is strict about what counts as a primary source.

Byline and author bio

Google's guidance frames the first question as "who": is it self-evident to your visitors who authored your content, and do bylines lead to further information about the author? A name alone answers half of it. The byline should link to a bio or profile page that says what qualifies the person, and the bio should be reachable from every article they wrote.

This checker reads the byline through structured data, because that is the form machines can read without guessing. It looks for the Article node's author and a name on it, then for credential fields on that author: jobTitle, hasCredential, knowsAbout, sameAs, url or description. Any one of them passes, which is a lenient bar on purpose: it separates "a person with some stated qualification" from "a name or nothing". Where the theme renders an author box, it also checks that the box carries a bio or the Person schema links a profile.

Person and Organization schema

JSON-LD is the block of structured data in a page's head that tells machines what the page is. For E-E-A-T it carries three things a reader sees informally: the article type, the author as a Person (or a named Organization), and the dates. Most modern themes and SEO plugins write it, but many write it with the site name as the author, or with no dates, or with an author that has nothing but a name.

// the author, as a checker reads it
"author": {
  "@type": "Person",
  "name": "Author Name",
  "jobTitle": "Certified Financial Planner",
  "sameAs": [
    "https://brokercheck.finra.org/individual/summary/0000000",
    "https://www.linkedin.com/in/author-name"
  ]
}

Structured data does not create expertise that is not on the page, and it is not a lever for AI answers. It helps machines read what the page already says. A page that says the author is a CFP in the byline and says nothing in the schema is asking every machine reader to infer it.

About and contact pages

Raters are told to look beyond the page to the site: who runs it, and how to reach them. An About page that names the people, a contact page with a real address or phone number, and for regulated firms the disclosures a regulator requires, are all part of trust. These are site-level signals, so they are not on this page's card. Verand's full site audit checks them once per site, and weighs them as their own layer of the E-E-A-T score.

Citations

Citations do two jobs. They let a reader check a claim, and they show that the writer went to the source. The checker grades both. On an article over 600 words it fails a page with no footnotes and no external links at all. When the body does cite sources, it fails a page where none of them is authoritative: government and regulator domains, universities and a named list of research and industry bodies count; general explainer sites do not. A tax article that cites three blogs and not the IRS is the case it exists to catch. Where an article has a Sources or References section, it also checks that the Article schema lists those sources as citation.

Dates

A reader of a tax or benefits article needs to know which year's rules it describes. The checker asks for both datePublished and dateModified in the Article schema, in ISO format, and separately flags a copyright or "last updated" year that is two or more years old. It does not decide whether the content is out of date, only whether the page says when it was written and touched.

Credentials a reader can verify with the regulator

The strongest trust signal a regulated professional can publish is one a stranger can check without trusting the page at all: a CRD number that opens the adviser's record on FINRA BrokerCheck or the SEC's IAPD, a bar admission a state bar's directory confirms, a licence number on a state board's lookup. A generic "expert" badge cannot be verified. A BrokerCheck link can.

The place those links belong in structured data is the author's sameAs. This checker fails an article whose author or organization schema has no sameAs links at all, and its guidance names the regulator profiles first. What it does not do yet is confirm that a link points at a regulator rather than, say, a social profile. Treat a pass as "links exist", and put the regulator link first.

Common mistakes

• The site as the author. The SEO plugin's default names the organization on every article. It passes the named-author check and tells a reader nothing about expertise.
• A byline only in the design. The theme prints "By Jane Smith, CPA" but the schema is empty. People see an author; machines see none.
• Credentials in the bio, not in the data. The bio page says CFP, but the author node has no job title, credential or profile link.
• Dates stripped for "evergreen" content. Hiding the date to look timeless removes the one signal a reader of a rules-based topic needs.
• Citing explainers instead of sources. Linking to a summary of an IRS rule instead of the rule. It reads as research and fails the authoritative-citation check.
• A footer year left behind. A copyright line three years old makes a current article look abandoned.
• Generic third-person prose. An article that never says "we" or "our clients" reads like it was written from other articles. The experience check looks for exactly that absence.

What a strong article looks like

A named person as author, with a credential in the schema and a byline that links to a bio. Both dates, in the schema and visible. Prose that speaks from practice. Claims backed by the primary source, listed in a Sources section and in the schema. The author's regulator profile in sameAs. None of that guarantees a ranking or a citation in an AI answer, and no checker can promise either. It makes the page's evidence readable by every person and machine that looks.