How to Conduct an E-E-A-T Audit and What You’ll Learn

Ten years ago, assessing a website’s ability to rank in Google search was a fairly straightforward, quantitative practice.

How many times does the target keyword appear? How high is the word count? How many backlinks does it have?

In those days, search algorithms were relatively easy to satisfy — if you knew how. Today, engines like Google (not to mention AI search) have become vastly more sophisticated in their ability to evaluate quality, relevance and trustworthiness of content, and harder to manipulate with workarounds like keyword stuffing.

The process behind this evaluation is more complex than counting keywords. Today, search engines are evaluating the quality of your content through a more complex calculation. But you can still tap into powerful score-based assessments of your website’s potential in search.

An E-E-A-T audit is your ticket to insight, action and improvement.

Get Your Free E-E-A-T Scorecard!

What is an E-E-A-T audit?

An E-E-A-T audit is a systematic evaluation of a website’s content, author credentials, domain reputation, and trust-building signals to identify strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities. Using Google’s E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) guidelines as a basis, these audits provide a clear picture of how well your content and website demonstrate the credibility needed to rank well in search results.

Learn all about these quality rater guidelines: What Are E-E-A-T Guidelines, and How Can You Optimize Your Site Around Them?

Optimizing your web presence in alignment with E-E-A-T principles is not just important for gaining search visibility. As you’ll soon see, these guidelines are meant to mimic the way human beings make judgments about credibility and reliability of a source, especially in the age of artificial intelligence.

Does Google trust your site enough to feature it in search results? Will people trust your site when they find it? E-E-A-T audits give you the answers.

Key components of an E-E-A-T audit

Comprehensive E-E-A-T audits examine each of the framework’s four facets using a combination of quantitative and qualitative factors. This process doesn’t focus on a single web page, but rather the full breadth of your brand’s digital presence. An effective E-E-A-T audit, like those we conduct at TopRank, will align directly with Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines.

Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines

Here are the four categories evaluated during an E-E-A-T audit.

Experience

Does the content showcase first-hand experience and real-world insights?
Are there personal anecdotes, case studies, relatable examples, or original research that differentiate this content from the AI-saturated crowd?
Are subject matter experts involved in the creation of content?

Expertise