E-E-A-T as a score you can move.
Search quality guidelines and the citation behaviour of AI engines converge on one question: is there anyone real behind this page? Writegarden answers it as a score out of 100, with the specific findings behind every point.
Four pillars, scored · findings and history per pillar · Person and Organization JSON-LD on every article.
Why authority stopped being a soft signal
For most of SEO's history, E-E-A-T was advice rather than instrumentation: write authoritatively, add an author bio, hope. Two things changed. Quality raters were given explicit E-E-A-T criteria that feed the systems ranking your pages, and AI engines began preferring sources they can attribute confidently — a named author with a track record, an organisation with a verifiable identity, content that cites primary sources. Both now reward the same structural work. Both can be measured instead of guessed at.
What the Trust Score reads
Four dials, each backed by the findings that produced it and a history series that shows the direction of travel.
Experience
Evidence that the content comes from someone who has done the thing. First-hand accounts, specifics that cannot be paraphrased off a competitor, original observation. The Voice pillar is the main way this dial moves.
Expertise
Depth and correctness in the subject: topical coverage, precision of claims, and whether the author profile behind the byline actually supports the subject matter.
Authoritativeness
Recognition beyond your own site — how your organisation is identified, described and referenced elsewhere, including how the six tracked AI engines describe your brand.
Trustworthiness
The signals that make a site safe to cite: clear organisational identity, reachable contact and policy pages, transparent authorship, and structured data that matches reality.
Findings, not just a number
Each dial expands into the specific findings behind it, so the score reads as a work queue rather than a verdict. A stale-input nudge flags when the inputs behind a score have aged out of usefulness.
History over time
Scores are kept as a series. The number matters less than the slope: whether the authority work you shipped last month moved anything at all.
Identity that ships with the article
Author profiles and organisation identity are not a bio page nobody visits. Each author profile emits Person JSON-LD and the organisation record emits Organization JSON-LD, attached to the articles you publish. That is the machine-readable half of authority — the part search engines parse and AI engines use to decide whether a source can be attributed. Fill in an author profile once and it propagates to every article carrying that byline.
What buyers ask about E-E-A-T.
Is the Trust Score a Google score?
No. Google does not publish an E-E-A-T score, and anything presented as one is invented. This is Writegarden's own assessment against the four published criteria, built so the findings are inspectable and the movement over time is meaningful.
Do I need real, named authors?
For Experience and Expertise to move meaningfully, yes. A named author with a genuine profile is the entire point; a fabricated persona defeats the exercise and carries its own risk.
Does this edit my existing site?
No. Writegarden scores what is already there and emits schema on the articles it publishes. Changes to your existing pages stay yours to make.
What about per-article schema?
Author and organisation schema ship today. A per-article schema editor and automatic AI disclosure footers are in build; the disclosure wording itself is set out in the AI disclosure policy.