- SEO consultant David Quaid has pushed back against the idea that sites can run their pages through a simple E-E-A-T checker and get anything close to a Google-backed score.
- The debate exposes a familiar SEO problem: broad quality concepts often get turned into dashboard numbers that look more precise than they really are.
SEO has a habit of turning messy things into neat little scores.
Content quality becomes a score. Topical authority becomes a score. Internal linking becomes a score. And now, for some tools, E-E-A-T has become a score too.
That is the part David Quaid pushed back on in a recent post on X. His point was simple: there is no official Google E-E-A-T checker. Google does not hand out a public E-E-A-T number for a page and third-party tools cannot reveal one.
That does not mean every E-E-A-T checklist is useless. Some of them can spot obvious gaps. If a page has no author name, no clear publisher information, no sources and no visible reason to trust it, that is worth fixing.
The problem starts when a checklist begins to look like a measurement of Google’s actual opinion.
It is not.
Boom!!!!!!!! 💣🚀
“There is no such thing as an official Google E‑E‑A‑T checker… E‑E‑A‑T is a conceptual framework reviewers use to evaluate content quality.”
We can finally kill some of the SEO myths:
❌ No, there isn’t a magical Google “E‑E‑A‑T score” or official checker… pic.twitter.com/Kmt5wDmQVB
— David Quaid – AI SEO (@DavidGQuaid) May 31, 2026
The Score Looks Cleaner Than The Reality
An E-E-A-T tool can only measure what it has been programmed to find.
It can check whether there is an author bio. It can look for an About page. It can scan for contact details, schema markup, external links, references, credentials or certain trust-related words. Then it can turn those signals into a percentage or grade.
That may be useful as a basic audit.
But it is not the same thing as measuring experience, expertise, authoritativeness or trust.
A tool can see that an author box exists. It cannot always know whether the author has real experience with the topic. It can see that sources are linked. It cannot always judge whether those sources are the right ones. It can see that a page looks complete. It cannot easily know whether the advice is accurate, original or genuinely helpful.
That is why E-E-A-T is awkward for SEO tools. The concept is partly visible on the page, but it is not only on the page.
A product review, a medical article, a local restaurant guide and a technical SEO case study all show trust in different ways. One may need first-hand testing. Another may need professional credentials. Another may need reputation, citations or clear editorial standards.
A single score flattens all of that context.
What Google Actually Says About E-E-A-T
Google’s own wording is more careful than much of the SEO industry conversation around this topic.
In its guidance on helpful, reliable, people-first content, Google says its automated systems use many different factors to identify content that demonstrates aspects of experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. Google also makes clear that E-E-A-T itself is not a single specific ranking factor.
That distinction matters.
E-E-A-T is better understood as a way to think about quality, especially for topics where trust really matters. It is not a hidden switch. It is not a simple number. It is not something a site can “pass” by adding a few missing fields.
Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines are also often misunderstood in this debate. Human raters use those guidelines to evaluate whether Google’s systems are returning good results. They do not sit there manually ranking individual websites. The guidelines are useful because they show what Google wants quality to look like, but they are not a direct ranking checklist.
That is where E-E-A-T checkers can become misleading.
They take a human judgment framework and turn it into a mechanical audit.
Why Site Owners Still Want The Score
The appeal is obvious.
Site owners want clarity. Agencies want deliverables. SEO teams want something they can put into a report. A score feels clean because it gives everyone a number to improve.
If a dashboard says a page has a 46% E-E-A-T score, the next step seems simple. Raise the score.
But that can push teams toward surface-level fixes. They add author bios that say very little. They create generic About pages. They add schema and assume the trust problem is solved. They link to a few sources without improving the article itself.
The page may look more complete after that. It may even be better than before.
But the deeper question remains: why should anyone trust this content?
That question is harder to answer, which is probably why the SEO industry keeps trying to turn it into something easier.
The Useful Part Of E-E-A-T Audits
There is still a practical use for these tools, as long as they are treated as checklists rather than truth machines.
For many sites, especially newer publishers, the basics are often missing. The author is unclear. The company behind the site is hard to identify. The sourcing is thin. The content makes claims without proof. The About page sounds generic. The site gives readers very little reason to believe there is real expertise behind the article.
An E-E-A-T checklist can help catch those issues.
It can remind teams to make authorship clearer, improve sourcing, add editorial policies, strengthen author pages, show real experience and make the business behind the content easier to verify.
That is useful work.
It just should not be confused with “optimizing for an E-E-A-T score.”
The better question is not, “How do we raise this tool’s number?”
The better question is, “Would a reader who lands on this page have a clear reason to trust it?”
The Query Post View
Quaid’s criticism lands because it points to something SEO keeps doing.
Whenever Google talks about a broad quality concept, the industry looks for a shortcut. The concept becomes a score. The score becomes a feature. The feature becomes a sales pitch.
Sometimes that is helpful. Often it creates false confidence.
E-E-A-T is not useless because it cannot be scored cleanly. It is important precisely because it forces site owners to think beyond the easy stuff.
Who wrote this?
Why should they be trusted?
Is there real experience behind the advice?
Does the site have a reputation in this topic?
Would a reader feel safe acting on the information?
Those questions are not as neat as a dashboard number. But they are closer to what matters.
The safest way to use E-E-A-T is as an editorial lens, not a magic metric. A tool can help you spot missing trust signals. It cannot manufacture trust for you.
That still has to come from the content, the people behind it and the reputation the site builds over time.
