If you’ve spent any time in SEO circles since 2022, you’ve been told to “improve your EEAT” and warned that your site is “YMYL.” I think most of that advice is noise, and I’ve been saying so loudly enough that people now send me the arguments before I’ve made them.
So let me lay it out properly, in one place: where EEAT comes from, why it isn’t a ranking factor, why the usual tactics don’t work, how narrow YMYL really is, and what I think you should be doing instead.
Where EEAT actually comes from
EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) isn’t an algorithm. It’s a framework from Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines, a document written for the contractors Google pays to evaluate search results by hand.
That origin is the whole argument. Those raters aren’t editing rankings. Their job is to assess whether Google’s systems are returning good results and to flag spam, and their ratings feed back as evaluation data, not as a live signal attached to your page. The guidelines describe what a careful human should look for. They don’t describe what Google’s crawler measures.
Somewhere between Google’s framing and the average conference talk, the industry took a document about how to judge a results page and turned it into a checklist for how to build one.
It is not a ranking factor
I’ll say it plainly: EEAT is not a ranking factor, and treating it as one is a category error.
The Quality Rater Guidelines exist so humans can evaluate Google’s systems. Their output doesn’t directly change where a page ranks. So any advice that says “add EEAT to rank higher” is describing a mechanism that, as far as anyone can show, doesn’t exist. What’s grown up around it is mythology, and it’s grown far beyond anything Google ever said.
Don’t take my word for it. John Mueller has said that EEAT is not something Google’s systems algorithmically look for on ordinary, non-YMYL sites. That’s a narrower claim than “EEAT does nothing,” and I’m careful about it: the concept may describe what Google wants to surface on genuinely sensitive queries. But it’s not a dial you can turn on a typical commercial site.
The practical consequence is that “we lost rankings because of weak EEAT” is almost never a real diagnosis. It’s a label applied after the fact, usually in place of looking at indexing, links, or the competition.
Why your author bio isn’t doing anything
If EEAT isn’t a ranking factor, then the standard EEAT tactics are optimizing for a signal nobody is reading. The problem with all of them is the same: none of it can be verified.
The playbook looks like this. Add author bios with credentials and headshots. Mark pages up with Person or author schema that declares expertise. Write “I have 15 years of experience” into the copy. Link to an About page listing qualifications.
Google does not simply trust self-declared credentials, and it has no reliable way to validate them. Anyone can write a bio. Anyone can add schema claiming to be a doctor. A system that rewarded those claims would be trivially gamed, which is exactly why there’s no evidence it does.
That doesn’t make bios or schema bad. They can help readers. But doing them “for EEAT” is pulling a lever that isn’t connected to anything.
The post-Helpful-Content solve-all
I trace the current obsession to the Helpful Content Update. When sites started losing traffic in waves, content SEOs needed an explanation and a remedy, and EEAT became both.
It’s now the default answer regardless of what the real problem is. Traffic down? EEAT. New site not ranking? EEAT. Competitor outranking you? Their EEAT must be stronger. The term is elastic enough to explain anything, which is exactly why it explains nothing. Without a genuine YMYL context, most EEAT discussion is effectively meaningless.
The same goes for the “EEAT audit” that agencies now sell. Most of these are rebranded content reviews or CRO work. They look at whether the copy is credible and whether the site feels trustworthy, which is useful, but it isn’t a new discipline and it isn’t a ranking lever.
What I do endorse is treating EEAT as a mental model: would a sensible human reviewer look at this site and conclude it’s real, competent, and safe? That’s a reasonable question. It’s not something you optimize with a checklist, and it’s not something you can score.
YMYL is a query, not an industry
My view on YMYL is, if anything, more pointed. The term is very narrow and applies to specific queries, not to whole sites or whole industries.
The vast majority of self-described “YMYL sites” fall outside the definition entirely. Being in a sensitive-sounding vertical isn’t the test. The test is whether a particular query, answered badly, could genuinely harm someone’s health, finances, or safety.
The examples I accept are rare. Certain COVID and vaccine-related queries are cases where Google visibly treated results differently. What I don’t accept is the blanket version: general healthcare content, chiropractic sites, supplement stores, and most legal and finance sites don’t automatically qualify just because the topic touches money or wellbeing.
Follow popular SEO discourse and nearly anything connected to life, death, or living beings ends up labelled YMYL, at which point the label describes most of the internet and stops meaning anything. A term that applies to everything isn’t a classification. It’s an excuse.
And over-applying it has a cost. Sites that don’t need to behave like a medical journal spend money trying to look like one, and the actual reasons they aren’t ranking go unexamined.
FEECAAL, if you must have an acronym
I’ve offered an alternative, mostly to make a point. FEECAAL: Fun, Entertaining, Experience, Creative, Art, Authority, Learning.
EEAT, as the industry uses it, is narrow and formulaic. Prove you’re an expert, prove you’re trustworthy, add the markup. FEECAAL is a reminder that most content people actually seek out is engaging, creative, or enjoyable, and none of those qualities fit into a credentials checklist. A piece can be written by an unimpeachable expert and still be something nobody wants to read.
I don’t expect FEECAAL to catch on. It exists to make the EEAT framing look as arbitrary as I think it is.
The takeaway
I’m not arguing that trust, expertise, or user safety don’t matter. I’m arguing that the industry turned a rater-training document into a ranking religion, then stretched YMYL until it covered every site with a pulse.
The result is a lot of effort spent on signals Google can’t verify, a lot of audits that are content reviews in a new wrapper, and a convenient explanation for any ranking drop that avoids looking at links, indexing, or the competition.
Show me the mechanism, or stop calling it a ranking factor.
