For consulting and technology firms, trust is the actual product. With E-E-A-T, meaning experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, Google describes how its raters judge content quality. AI systems assembling answers from sources look for similar signals. This article describes what is practically achievable for B2B service firms, using this website as an example.
What E-E-A-T is and is not
E-E-A-T comes from the guidelines Google uses to have human raters assess the quality of its search results; the extra E for experience was added at the end of 2022. It is not a single ranking factor you can switch on but a bundle of qualities good content typically has. Trying to fake E-E-A-T with boilerplate misses the point.
Showing experience
Experience shows in content only someone who has actually done the work can write: concrete processes, typical mistakes, trade-offs from projects. Generic texts any agency could write prove no experience. On this website, the articles on requirements engineering, HERMES or Microsoft 365 governance draw on the author’s mandates, without naming confidential details.
Proving expertise
An author page with education, certifications and focus areas, a byline on every expert article and structured data making this machine-readable. On this website every byline links to a profile page with structured data for degrees and certifications; organisations where the author worked in mandates are named as text, with a note that this is not an endorsement by those organisations.
Building authority
Authority arises mainly outside your own website: mentions in trade media, talks, directories and links from recognised sources. Content others want to cite helps, such as maintained overviews like our regulatory deadlines or UBO thresholds by country.
Securing trust
A complete legal notice with commercial register and UID, a consistent address across platforms, traceable sources in expert articles, dates and a public editorial policy describing how content is created, including the use of AI tools. And honesty about limits: not naming clients without consent and not inventing figures is more credible than many logos without evidence.
Link to AI systems
AI assistants prefer to cite sources that give a clear answer early, are clearly attributed to an author and organisation and state current data with sources. Measures for E-E-A-T and for visibility in AI answers therefore overlap strongly. How to measure this visibility is described in our article on measuring AI visibility; implementation in our GEO and AEO optimisation offer.