EEAT and AI: a fistfull of clicks
Nowadays, everything is AI or has something to do with it, so the question naturally arises: does Google’s E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) still matter? Our analysis reveals that not only is it essential, but ignoring EEAT today means choosing invisibility in the generative search landscape.
Google E‑E‑A‑T
In a nutshell, EEAT (which stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) is Google’s yardstick for assessing the reliability and quality of content and its source.
Big G is trying to solve a problem that is more philosophical than technical. Just as many have wondered, from Plato to Sartre, the real dilemma is: how do you distinguish the true from the plausible?
EEAT is simply the digital answer to this age-old question.
Think about the web fifteen or twenty years ago. It was the Wild West. All you had to do was fill a page with keywords and buy a few links here and there to get on the first page. It was the era of pioneers, tricks, and Black Hat SEO. It is no coincidence that the most famous manipulative techniques on the web take their names from the most famous villains of the West, the outlaws of ranking. We are talking about those highly deceptive techniques and tactics that exploited certain features of search engine algorithms to try to force the hand of a website’s ranking, pushing it up in Google’s SERPs. There was no control in the Saloon of the Web: shameless links, development of different pages for users and search engines, but also more trivial techniques such as keyword stuffing or the purchase of paid links created solely for this purpose. Until the sheriff arrived.
Google began introducing increasingly sophisticated updates, from Panda to Penguin, in an attempt to bring order to this digital chaos. The goal was always the same: to give people the best results.
But what does “best” mean? For a long time, it meant “most relevant.”
If you searched for “carbonara recipe,” Google would show you the page that contained the words “recipe,” “carbonara,” “guanciale,” and “eggs” the most times. Today, that’s no longer enough. Google wants to know if the person who wrote that recipe has ever actually cooked carbonara in their life or if they simply copied and pasted from other sites.
It wants proof of experience, and today, even more so, it needs to feed the entire system of artificial intelligence that builds answers, summaries, and overviews.
AI Overview and the amplification of authority
The introduction of AI Overview, AI Mode, and Search Generative Experience (SGE) marked a point of no return in the way we consume information.
Google no longer acts as an index showing a list of links, but has become a summarizer, a curator that distills the most likely and authoritative answer directly at the top of the page (or in chat).
And what do these summaries use to feed themselves?
Content that screams reliability and verifiability.
The EEAT, with its four pillars, is the mechanism that AI uses to discern quality. Experience provides first-hand data, case studies, and authentic opinions that only those who have “done” can offer. Expertise manifests itself through signed content, clear credentials, and recognizable authors, reassuring AI that the writer has what it takes. Authoritativeness is built with mentions, links, and co-citations from accredited sources (true Digital PR, not tactical link building), confirming that your brand is recognized by the industry. Finally, Trustworthiness is the ethical foundation: transparency, brand consistency, site security, and up-to-date policies.
EEAT: semantic reputation
Another crucial turning point is that EEAT has gone beyond the boundaries of Google Search alone. The omnivorous nature of Artificial Intelligence means that large models not only feed on SERPs, but analyze everything that is publicly accessible online: social media, niche blogs, traditional media, forum citations, and company profiles. This means that your credibility can no longer be an isolated fact confined to your web domain; it must become a cross-cutting semantic reputation, an echo of trust that resonates consistently across all platforms. Building EEAT today makes you credible not only for Google Search, but also for its generative engines such as AI Overview and Gemini, for competitors such as ChatGPT and Perplexity, and even for social search platforms such as TikTok or Pinterest, where the validity of information is often questioned. The old SEO goal of “reaching the first page” has become insufficient. Now you always have to do SEO, but for AI so that they spontaneously cite, summarize, and recommend you as a reference source. Some call it GEO, others call it SEO for AI.
This shifts the entire marketing and SEO strategy from a game of algorithmic optimization to a game of building a 360-degree reputation.
The final paradox
And this is where the great, ironic paradox of AI manifests itself: to be considered valid by an artificial intelligence system, your information must be as human as possible. AI, by its very nature, cannot create experience, but can only summarize and replicate that of humans. For this reason, the algorithm desperately seeks the human imprint: sincerity, reality, and effort.
After all, we invented AI, and only human-created content is its only reliable source for representing the world. Consider the ChatGPT commercial that urges us to live the non-digital part of our lives: Artificial Intelligence is, in fact, referring us back to the source.
For a system that processes billions of pieces of data per second, the only sign of quality it cannot counterfeit is the visceral authenticity of lived experience.
Ultimately, EEAT has become a universal reputation system for the entire web, a bulwark against the rising tide of unverified information. Those who choose to ignore EEAT today are not only losing ground on Google; they are essentially choosing to cease being visible to the entire artificial intelligence ecosystem. On the contrary, those who adopt the principles of Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness with conviction and consistency not only gain the trust of human readers, but also become a point of reference that generative engines will actively use to respond to the world. The challenge is no longer to compete for a single keyword, but to become the source cited and recommended in all future summaries.
