With all the talk about brand authority shaping performance in Google, especially its AI search features, many people are wondering how to actually measure it.
The answer is an E-E-A-T audit.
If you’re unfamiliar with E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust), start with our guide to E-E-A-T in SEO. This post assumes you understand the basics and are ready to audit a brand you’re working with.
Download the E-E-A-T Audit Checklist to follow along
The E-E-A-T framework emerged as part of Google’s assessment of Page Quality, described in its Quality Rater Guidelines.
It’s not an algorithm or ranking factor you can directly optimize for. Rather, it’s a conceptual framework that shapes how Google’s engineers and quality raters think about what makes content deserving of high rankings.
In short, the quality raters use E-E-A-T to evaluate websites, and those scores are then used by Google to improve and train its algorithms.
But, while Google explains what E-E-A-T looks like, they don’t tell you how to systematically audit your own brand for these qualities.
That’s where this checklist comes in.
The qualities Google trains raters to recognize manifest through hundreds of measurable markers. SEO researchers like Olaf Kopp have mapped 80+ potential signals from patents related to E-E-A-T and official statements:
While Shaun Anderson connected E-E-A-T concepts to leaked API factors like siteFocusScore, contentEffort, and siteAuthority.
This checklist builds on their research and translates it into a practical audit process.
Why 220+ markers? Because, to paraphrase Google’s John Mueller, E-E-A-T isn’t something you add to a website with a few technical tweaks.
Sometimes SEOs come to us or like mention that they’ve added E-E-A-T to their web pages. That’s not how it works. Sorry, you can’t sprinkle some experiences on your web pages.
It’s earned through building a solid brand, establishing genuine expertise, and cultivating trust and a positive reputation over time—both on your site and across the wider web.
That means auditing everything from your homepage to third-party reviews, from author credentials to press mentions, from content accuracy to social proof. If it signals trust and credibility to users, platforms, or algorithms, it’s worth checking.
How This E-E-A-T Audit Works
Instead of trying to measure abstract E-E-A-T qualities, we’ll audit the tangible entities where these signals appear:
- Brand and Website – Your foundational presence, reputation, and search visibility
- People – The individuals connected to your brand (founders, authors, experts)
- Pages – Your individual pieces of content and their quality markers
Each entity includes specific markers cross-referenced to Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines, so you get a complete picture of your brand’s E-E-A-T.
Download the checklist to get started:
You can also share it with your preferred LLM and use Ahrefs’ MCP to help automate the process.
According to Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines, evaluators assess whether a website has a clear purpose, shows who’s responsible for it, and demonstrates a positive reputation.
These foundational signals establish legitimacy and are part of “Trust” in the E-E-A-T framework.
If your website feels untrustworthy because you do not have these elements in place, that could be enough to justify a “Lowest” rating, even if you perform well in everything else.
When auditing these elements, look for:
- Brand clarity: Is your brand name consistent across your site, socials, and directories?
- About & contact info: Do you clearly show who you are, what you do, and how to reach you?
- Transparency: Are legal pages (privacy, terms, disclaimers) visible and up to date?
- Professional design: Do your brand’s visual elements look and feel authoritative and trustworthy?
If these basics are missing, your site can appear untrustworthy, no matter how strong your content or links are.
Your brand’s performance in Google search isn’t part of the Quality Rater Guidelines themselves, but it serves as a useful proxy for how well your existing E-E-A-T signals are working.
Think of it as checking the scoreboard: if Google is already ranking you well for branded and topical queries, it suggests Google recognizes you as a relevant authority to some degree.
Look for:
- Branded searches: Do many people search for your brand name on Google?
- Branded results: Do searches for your name only show your website and brand profiles?
- Recognized entity: Is your brand in Google’s Knowledge Graph as a distinct, recognized entity?
- Topical reach: Do you rank for non-branded queries in your niche, not just your brand name?
- SERP features: Do you appear in AI responses, People Also Ask, or other credibility-enhancing elements?
Together, these signals show whether Google recognizes your brand as a relevant authority in your space.
You can start auditing many of these signals for free using Ahrefs Webmaster Tools. For example, once you add your site as a verified project, you can check out all the keywords it ranks for in the Organic keywords report:
You can use the Keyword filter to only show your branded searches:
You can also filter for specific entities, topics, or search result features.
Pay attention to keywords that are specifically related to your brand, its products, key individuals, or even sub-brands. This is your brand’s current search demand.
You can think of search demand in two ways: by the number of individual searches (indicating breadth) …
…or by the total monthly search volume (indicating popularity).
The bigger these numbers are, the stronger the demand and the more authoritative your brand may be perceived to be by search platforms.
Google’s AI-powered features (like AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Gemini) are increasingly shaping how users discover information. These features work by synthesizing content from sources across the web, and the brands that get cited or mentioned are typically those with strong authority signals that Google’s AI models already recognize.
Auditing your presence in AI search helps you understand whether your E-E-A-T signals are strong enough to be surfaced as a credible source when AI answers questions in your domain.
Look for:
- AI citations: Does your site appear as a linked source in AI Overviews or AI Mode responses?
- Brand mentions: Is your brand referenced in AI-generated answers, even without a direct link?
- Topic coverage: What topics does Google’s AI associate with your brand?
- Competitor comparison: Which competitors appear most often for your core topics?
- Accuracy: Are the mentions factually correct, or is misinformation present?
These signals indicate whether Google’s AI systems regard you as a trustworthy source worth citing.
You can use Ahrefs’ Brand Radar to gather these insights. Simply search for your brand:
Then, check the AI responses report to get a list of all the AI answers that mention your brand in either the query or response. Each response will look like this:
You can also switch between AI search platforms to see how you perform across each one:
Use the Cited Pages report to get a list of all the pages linked as citations in AI responses containing your brand.
For an in-depth guide on how to audit your brand’s AI visibility, check out this post sharing my top Brand Radar use cases.
Although not directly mentioned in the E-E-A-T framework, your brand’s reputation significantly affects its trustworthiness.
Google’s quality raters are instructed to believe what independent, credible sources say about your brand above what you say about yourself. That’s how Google gets a measure of whether you’re an authoritative, trustworthy source for a topic or not.
Look for:
- Backlinks and press: Have you been mentioned in high-quality publications or industry sites?
- Reviews: What do customers say on Google, Facebook, ProductReview, or niche review platforms?
- Directories and profiles: Are your business listings consistent and complete across the web?
- Community presence: Do you have sponsorships, partnerships, associations, or other signals of real-world credibility?
- Sentiment: Are mentions mostly positive, neutral, or negative?
Together, these factors help search engines and users cross-verify your brand’s authority. A strong off-site footprint reinforces what you say about yourself, making it harder for competitors to displace you.
If you’re using Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, check out the Backlink reports in Site Explorer. You’ll get a list of every link to your website from around the web:
Or, in Brand Radar, you can check the Web Pages report to see all the pages that mention your brand, even if there’s no link.
Between these two reports, you’ll get a decent picture of who’s saying what about your brand and whether there are any patterns in the sentiment or topics that people connect to your brand.
Even the strongest content can lose credibility if your site is untrustworthy or not secured properly at a technical level. An E-E-A-T audit should include a quick check of the basics, like:
- Schema markup: Do you use structured data for your organization, people, and content?
- Security: Is your site served over HTTPS, and, for ecommerce, does checkout use secure gateways?
- Site hygiene: Broken links, crawl errors, or spammy backlinks can all undermine trust.
You don’t need to check these manually. Ahrefs’ Site Audit tool can crawl your site and flag missing schema, security issues, and over 170 other technical gaps.
If you’re unsure how to fix any issues that show up for your website, click the question mark symbols for a helpful explanation:
In recent years, Google has published extensive guidance on creating helpful content, emphasizing the importance of creating content for people, not search engines. This aligns directly with how Quality Raters are trained to evaluate E-E-A-T on each page they’re evaluating.
An E-E-A-T audit should verify whether your pages appear credible to both users and search engines, and whether your content is trustworthy.
Look for:
- Quality: Does the content demonstrate adequate effort, originality, and talent or skill?
- Accuracy: Is the content fact-checked, cited, and free of obvious errors?
- Transparency: Do articles show authors, bios, and credentials?
- Proof signals: Case studies, awards, unique data, or client testimonials.
- Freshness: Are important pages updated regularly?
- Design trust: Do pages include credibility markers such as reviews, maps, or security seals?
Strong content is backed by evidence, updated over time, and visibly tied to real people.
You can use Ahrefs’ Site Explorer > Top Pages report to audit which pages get the most traffic and links, then prioritize strengthening E-E-A-T signals on those high-value assets.
Google evaluates not just brands, but also the people behind them, especially the website owners and content creators.
A 360° E-E-A-T audit should confirm whether your leadership, authors, and subject-matter experts are clearly presented and verifiable online.
Look for:
- Author attribution: Do articles have bylines, bios, and links to professional profiles?
- Credentials: Are qualifications, awards, or media appearances listed and backed up by independent sources?
- Knowledge panels: Do key people show up in Google’s Knowledge Graph as distinct entities?
- Consistency: Are names, roles, and expertise described the same way across your site and external profiles?
Strong personal signals increase overall brand trust. You can repeat the above steps for each key person you’d like to audit. Where you searched or filtered for the company’s brand name, just swap it out for the person’s most common name online.
For example, instead of searching for Ahrefs in Brand Radar, I could search for Tim Soulo, Ahrefs’ CMO, to see everywhere his name is mentioned online and how his reputation is linked to the brand’s.
Alternatively, I could explore what AI search platforms say about Tim and how they describe his connection to (and influence over) the Ahrefs brand.
Beyond individual pages or people, a holistic E-E-A-T audit should also confirm that your site as a whole looks legitimate and trustworthy. These signals often make the difference between a site that feels credible at first glance and one that raises doubts.
Look for:
- Legal pages: Clear policies on privacy, terms, returns, warranties, and disclaimers.
- Contact details: Phone numbers, addresses, and maps that prove your business is real.
- Consistency: Do all site sections use the same brand name, formatting, and voice?
- YMYL coverage: If you operate in “your money or your life” niches, is the information accurate, safe, and compliant?
- Reviews & testimonials: Are they embedded across key pages to reinforce trust?
You can use Ahrefs’ Site Audit to check site-wide consistency and uncover hidden issues that might weaken trust, from broken links to missing schema. It’s especially great for flagging issues that machine and search crawlers will likely find.
But, you’ll also need to manually check out key pages to get a gut feel on how human visitors perceive the website.
As you go through each item in the checklist, use the 5-point scale to rate each signal using the same scoring method as Google’s quality raters. The sheet will automatically convert those ratings into percentage scores that you can share with stakeholders, providing them with a simple snapshot of your brand’s credibility.
Don’t stop at measurement, though.
Use the Next Steps columns to note concrete actions you want to plan out, whether that’s improving author bios, tightening schema markup, or earning reviews on key platforms.
This way, your E-E-A-T audit becomes an actionable roadmap for strengthening trust over time.
Putting it in practice: Assess this post’s own E-E-A-T
Before we wrap up, let’s apply the E-E-A-T framework to this guide itself to lock in our learnings. Does this post demonstrate the qualities it’s teaching you to audit?
- Experience: This checklist emerged from my audits of hundreds of brands when working agency-side. The structure reflects what actually worked in practice for my team and me.
- Expertise: The framework builds on established research by industry experts such as Olaf Kopp and Shaun Anderson, while adding a practical audit methodology.
- Authority: Every marker in the checklist is cross-referenced to official sources—primarily Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines, the original source of the E-E-A-T framework.
- Trust: Now the question is back to you: Does knowing all this make you trust the content more?
That’s the E-E-A-T framework in action. When experience, expertise, and authority are transparent and verifiable, trust follows.
This is exactly what you’re building for your own brand through this audit process.
Wrapping up
An E-E-A-T audit surfaces whether your brand looks credible everywhere it appears online.
By reviewing authority signals across your brand’s foundations, search presence, content, people, and site-wide factors, you can spot the gaps that weaken trust and take clear steps to fix them.
Use the 220+ point E-E-A-T audit checklist to guide your review, and Ahrefs’ tools like Site Explorer, Content Explorer, Brand Radar, and Site Audit to make the process faster and more reliable.
The stronger your E-E-A-T signals, the more likely you are to earn visibility and trust in both traditional and AI-driven search.