Who Wrote This? Why Google Cares About Experience and Trust

A dental practice decides to start a blog to attract more patients through search. To save time, the practice manager uses an AI tool to produce two articles a week: “Ten tips for healthier teeth”, “Why flossing matters”, “What to expect at a check-up”. They’re tidy, grammatically perfect and almost identical to thousands of other articles on the same topics. None of them names an author. None of them mentions anything the practice has actually seen or done.

Six months and fifty articles later, very few people have found them through search.

Meanwhile, a dentist across town writes one article a month herself. Each draws on what she sees in her own surgery: the most common problem she treats in children, what she wishes patients knew before choosing veneers, how she handles nervous patients. Each carries her name, photo and qualifications. Her articles are found, read and shared.

The difference reflects something Google has been increasingly explicit about: it wants to show content that is helpful, trustworthy and clearly created by people who know what they’re talking about.

One Like insight: In a world full of generic content, your real experience is the hardest thing to copy.

What Google says it looks for

Google’s guidance for website owners, published on its Search Central site under the heading “Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content”, is unusually direct. It says Google’s automated ranking systems are designed to prioritise helpful, reliable information created to benefit people, rather than content created mainly to manipulate search rankings.

The page introduces a framework Google calls E-E-A-T: experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. Google explains that its systems try to identify a mix of factors that indicate these qualities, and that of these aspects, trust is most important. Its Search Quality Rater Guidelines, used by human reviewers who help Google evaluate search quality, go further, describing trust as the most important member of the family because untrustworthy pages have low E-E-A-T however experienced or expert they appear.

The second “E”, for experience, was added in 2022. It recognises that first-hand experience, such as having actually used a product, visited a place or done the work, can make content more helpful, not just formal qualifications.

Google also suggests creators ask three questions about their content: who created it, how it was created and why. It notes that readers find it helpful when it’s clear who created a piece of content.

Two important clarifications. E-E-A-T isn’t a single ranking score that can be measured directly; it’s a description of qualities Google’s systems try to reward. And Google has said that using AI to help create content isn’t against its guidelines in itself. What matters is whether the result is helpful, original and trustworthy.

Showing experience, expertise, authority and trust

For a small business, the good news is that you already have the raw material Google says it values. The task is to make it visible.

Experience: share what you’ve actually seen and done. Write from real cases, with permission and appropriate privacy: the most common problem you fix, a recent project and what you learned, the question every new customer asks. Original photos of your own work help too.

Expertise: show who’s behind the content. Put a real name on articles and advice, with a short bio covering relevant qualifications and years of experience. For topics that affect people’s health, money or safety, which Google calls “Your Money or Your Life” topics, this matters even more.

Authoritativeness: earn recognition from others. Mentions in local news, membership of professional bodies, partnerships, speaking at events and links from respected organisations all signal that others see you as a credible source.

Trust: be accurate, honest and transparent. Make it easy to see who you are, where you are and how to contact you. Show clear prices or price ranges, real reviews, policies on returns or complaints, and correct mistakes promptly. As we explored in Can Your Business Back Up Its Brand Promise?, proof matters more than claims.

If you use AI tools to help draft content, use them for structure and speed, then add the specifics only you can provide. As we explored in Why Brands Are Adding Mess on Purpose, visible human input is becoming more valuable, not less.

Auditing your content

Choose your five most important pages or articles. For each, ask Google’s three questions. Who created it, and is that clear to readers? How was it created, and does it include real, first-hand knowledge or just general information anyone could write? Why was it created: mainly to help customers, or mainly to rank in search? Then add what’s missing: a named author and short bio, a real example from your work, an original photo, clear contact and pricing information.

Going forward, it’s usually better to publish fewer, richer pieces than many thin ones. One genuinely useful article a month, drawing on what you see every day, is likely to do more than several generic posts a week.

A few questions can help:

• Is it clear who wrote each important page on our website, and why they’re qualified?
• Do our articles include first-hand experience that only we could provide?
• Would a customer find our contact details, prices and policies easily?
• If we use AI to draft, where do we add our own knowledge and checking?

Which brings us back to the two dental practices. The first had produced fifty articles that could have come from anywhere. The second had written a handful that could only have come from one dentist, in one surgery, who clearly knew her patients. In a search landscape increasingly full of generic content, that kind of genuine, named experience is exactly what Google says it wants to find, and exactly what customers are looking for too.

Sources

1. Google Search Central, “Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content”. Source of the people-first principle, E-E-A-T, the “trust is most important” statement and the Who, How and Why questions.
2. Google, Search Quality Rater Guidelines, as quoted in Search Engine Land’s E-E-A-T guide and other summaries.
3. Google Search Central blog, “Google Search’s guidance about AI-generated content”, February 2023 (general reference on AI-assisted content).