E-E-A-T content checklist: 20 items and fixes by score

The E-E-A-T content checklist is a tool that checks content quality as a number by splitting experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trust into five items each, 20 items in total. The point is that you can pinpoint exactly which items are missing instead of relying on a vague sense that "something feels off." If the E-E-A-T concept itself is unfamiliar, it helps to read the complete E-E-A-T guide first.

When and how to use this checklist

It is especially useful at three points.

• Final check before publishing: Score the 20 items after you finish writing and before you publish.
• Auditing existing posts: Use it to diagnose the current level of published content whose performance has stalled.
• Competitor comparison: Scoring top-ranking competitor posts and your own against the same criteria shows where the gap comes from.

Experience: 5 items

This axis checks whether the author has firsthand experience with the topic. Whether AI or a person wrote the draft, this is often the weakest axis.

Expertise: 5 items

This axis looks at how deeply the author understands the field.

Authoritativeness: 5 items

This axis looks at whether the content and site are recognized as a credible source on the topic.

Trustworthiness: 5 items

This is the axis Google considers most important ^[1]. Just taking care of two items, inline citations and date labels, makes a noticeable improvement.

Overall scorecard and action plan by grade

20 items across 4 axes, 1 point each, for a maximum of 20 points.

• Grade A (17-20): Maintain quality and refresh only the figures and references every 3-6 months.
• Grade B (13-16): Find the zero-point items and focus on strengthening just that axis. Most cases are solved by adding sources, date labels, and author information.
• Grade C (9-12): First identify the weakest of the four axes, then focus on improving that axis's five items.
• Grade D (0-8): Redesigning the content structure itself is faster than filling items one by one. We recommend rebuilding from scratch using the GEO content structure guide.

Getting a feel with a scoring example

Explanation alone does not give you a feel for it, so here is a short example. Suppose you are scoring an execution-guide post such as "GEO content structure guide."

On the Experience axis, writing such as "based on running our own A/B test" earns 1 point, while theory alone earns 0. On the Expertise axis, explaining "why AI prefers tables" earns 1 point, while ending at "add a table" is close to 0. On the Authoritativeness axis, the question is whether academic papers or official documents are cited, and on the Trustworthiness axis, it is whether those citations are marked accurately in the body as ^[1] and linked to the references at the bottom.

If you score each item while picturing concretely "what earns 1 point," you can assign a rough grade within a few minutes without reading the whole post. Sharing these criteria within the team also reduces large differences in scores between people.

Building this checklist into operations

A checklist pays off when you use it repeatedly, not once. Some teams use it as a pre-publish checklist, and others rescore a batch of their top existing content once a month to find posts whose grade has dropped. Either way, if you accumulate the scores in a spreadsheet, over time you see which axis is your team's chronic weakness. For example, if Authoritativeness keeps scoring low, a more fundamental fix than editing individual posts is to first build a team-wide list of sources you can cite often.

Common mistakes

• Perfecting only one axis: Even with a perfect Trustworthiness score, the overall impression is rated low if Experience is 0. Aim for at least 3 points on all four axes.
• Publishing AI-generated drafts as is: As the Princeton GEO study shows, content with citations and specific evidence is chosen more often in AI answers too ^[2]. The safe order is to publish AI drafts only after they pass this checklist.
• Making the score the goal: Filling in 20 points is not the goal in itself. Remember that the low-scoring items are where readers and AI actually judge trust, and improve them.

As you keep using this checklist, patterns naturally emerge showing which axis is your team's weak point. If you build those patterns into your content guidelines, your baseline score rises from the next post on, even without the checklist.

For related reading, see The complete E-E-A-T guide: what makes a site trusted by Google and AI search, What is GEO (generative engine optimization)? Which pages to start with, and in what order, and A 4-step framework that unifies SEO and GEO: split the team or combine it.