Before you start

What you'll need

• —Familiarity with the four E-E-A-T letters (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness)

YMYL (Your Money or Your Life)

Google's classification for content that could impact a reader's finances, health, safety, or well-being, held to a stricter E-E-A-T bar.

E-E-A-T

Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness, the four signals Google's raters use to judge content quality, with Trustworthiness as the umbrella letter.

The process

1 step

E-E-A-T scoring, 'How to File a Motor Claim'
  Experience        PRESENT   first-person 2024 claim narrative
  Expertise         MISSING   byline 'Team Digit', no name, no license number
  Authoritativeness MISSING   no author page, no external credential links
  Trustworthiness   WEAK      'as per IRDAI norms' cited with no clause number or source link
  Priority fix: name a licensed claims specialist as author before touching sourcing

Analyze your findings

What to look for

Byline specificity

Does the byline name a real, credentialed individual, or a generic team label?

Genuine experience signal

Is there a first-person detail that proves the author actually did the thing described?

Source verifiability

Can a cited regulation or fact be checked via a direct link or clause number?

Downstream dependency

Does fixing one letter unblock the others, or are the gaps independent?

Recommendation · Priority: High

“Assign a named, licensed claims specialist to the byline before publish, this is the single fix that unblocks both Expertise and Authoritativeness, the two letters currently scoring zero. Follow with a direct link to the specific IRDAI circular being paraphrased to close the Trustworthiness gap. The existing first-person claim narrative is a genuine Experience signal and should stay as-is.”

Common mistakes

What trips people up

• ×

  Treating the sourcing gap as the top priority — an unverifiable citation matters, but an anonymous byline zeroes out two full E-E-A-T letters at once, a bigger structural problem.

• ×

  Dismissing the first-person claim story as filler — on a YMYL page, a genuine personal experience detail is a real Experience signal and should be preserved, not cut for brevity.

• ×

  Scoring 'Team Digit' as adequate because the company is legitimate — Google's raters look for a named, verifiable individual, a real company name behind a generic team label doesn't substitute for a credentialed author.

Final deliverable

A completed 4-letter E-E-A-T scorecard for the claims guide with one ranked priority fix.

NerdWallet, 'How Credit Utilization Affects Your Score' scorecard (excerpt)
  Experience        PRESENT   author includes screenshots of their own credit report utilization change
  Expertise         PRESENT   named CFP with linked credentials
  Authoritativeness PRESENT   cited by 40+ finance sites per Ahrefs
  Trustworthiness   WEAK      no visible last-reviewed date on a page about a number that changes monthly
  Priority fix: add a visible 'last reviewed' date before the byline

Success criteria

You're done when you can:

• Scores all four E-E-A-T letters using evidence found in the byline and body text, not assumptions
• Correctly identifies Expertise/Authoritativeness as the highest-priority gap, not the sourcing weakness
• Names a concrete fix for the flagged gap

Key takeaway

On YMYL content, an anonymous byline is often the single biggest E-E-A-T gap because it blocks two letters (Expertise, Authoritativeness) at once, not just one. Score all four letters with evidence from the actual text, then fix the gap that unblocks the most value first.