Page 6 tells the raters their ratings do not move rankings

The file is 182 pages, it is called General Guidelines, its header carries the date 11 September 2025, Google links to it from the helpful-content documentation, and it costs nothing to download.

Page 6 tells the raters, before they rate anything, that their work does not move rankings. Which is roughly the opposite of what gets asserted on this document’s behalf.

So: quotes rather than summary. Section numbers refer to that version, and every block quote below is the document’s own wording.

The hierarchy, verbatim

Section 3.4 names the hierarchy before it defines a single term:

Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust (E-E-A-T) are all important considerations in PQ rating. The most important member at the center of the E-E-A-T family is Trust.

General Guidelines, 11 September 2025, section 3.4

Trust is defined first, and defined as a property of the page rather than of the author:

Trust: Consider the extent to which the page is accurate, honest, safe, and reliable.

General Guidelines, section 3.4

The other three arrive as supporting evidence for that judgement. The document’s own framing is that they “can support your assessment of Trust”:

Experience: Consider the extent to which the content creator has the necessary first-hand or life experience for the topic.

Expertise: Consider the extent to which the content creator has the necessary knowledge or skill for the topic.

Authoritativeness: Consider the extent to which the content creator or the website is known as a go-to source for the topic.

General Guidelines, section 3.4

Then the sentence that gets left out of every summary, stated later in the same section with an example that is hard to misread:

Trust is the most important member of the E-E-A-T family because untrustworthy pages have low E-E-A-T no matter how Experienced, Expert, or Authoritative they may seem. For example, a financial scam is untrustworthy, even if the content creator is a highly experienced and expert scammer who is considered the go-to on running scams!

General Guidelines, section 3.4

Max out three of the four letters and the page can still score Lowest. The acronym does not describe four boxes of equal weight, whatever the diagrams say. It is one criterion and three kinds of supporting evidence, and Google’s public documentation says as much in a line: “Of these aspects, trust is most important. The others contribute to trust, but content doesn’t necessarily have to demonstrate all of them.”

What page 6 tells the raters about their own work

Section 0.1, before any rating happens:

No single rating can directly impact how a particular webpage, website, or result appears in Google Search, nor can it cause specific webpages, websites, or results to move up or down on the search results page. Using ratings to position results on the search results page would not be feasible, as humans could never individually rate each page on the open web.

Instead, ratings are used to measure how effectively search engines are working to deliver helpful content to people around the world.

General Guidelines, section 0.1

Google repeats it in three places outside the PDF, which I checked one at a time.

The helpful-content page: “Search raters have no control over how pages rank. Rater data is not used directly in our ranking algorithms. Rather, we use them as a restaurant might get feedback cards from diners.” The generative-AI guidance page says the guidelines “are not a guide to ranking first in Google,” and that raters’ “ratings don’t directly influence ranking.” The December 2022 post that added the second E, on the raters: “they don’t directly influence ranking.”

The same helpful-content page also disposes of the phrase everyone uses, in a subordinate clause, which is presumably why nobody quotes it: “While E-E-A-T itself isn’t a specific ranking factor, using a mix of factors that can identify content with good E-E-A-T is useful.” Note the shape of that sentence. Not a factor. A mix of factors that can identify the thing.

Four readings the document does not support

“E-E-A-T is a ranking factor.” Covered above, so only the part that usually gets dropped: that mix of factors is weighted more heavily on topics “that could significantly impact the health, financial stability, or safety of people, or the welfare or well-being of society.” Which is the definition of YMYL, given in section 2.3.

“You need formal credentials.” For a whole class of pages, section 3.4.1 says the opposite: “Pages that share first-hand life experience on clear YMYL topics may be considered to have high E-E-A-T as long as the content is trustworthy, safe, and consistent with well-established expert consensus.” The December 2022 post drew the same line with tax. Filing your return correctly is a question for “an expert in the field of accounting.” Choosing tax software, the post suggests, might send you to “a forum discussion from people who have experience with different services” instead.

“Expertise is the most important letter.” Section 3.4 says Trust is, twice, and gives the expert-scammer example specifically to close this reading.

“A small site with no press coverage looks bad.” Section 3.3.5 addresses this directly:

However, small websites may have little or no reputation information. This is not indicative of high or low quality. […] A lack of reputation about people who post personal content is neither a positive nor a negative sign in your assessment of the page.

General Guidelines, section 3.3.5

Absence of coverage is scored as absence, not as a negative. That is a meaningfully different instruction from the one most SEO advice implies.

What the document asks of a small site

Section 2.5.2 is titled Finding Who is Responsible for the Website and Who Created the Content on the Page, and it sets two separate requirements:

Every page belongs to a website, and it should be clear:

• Who (what individuals, company, business, organization, government agency, etc.) is responsible for the website.
• Who (what individuals, company, business, organization, government agency, etc.) created the content on the page you are evaluating.

General Guidelines, section 2.5.2

Two questions, asked separately. Who runs the site, and who wrote this page. On a one-person site both answers are the same name, which is the rare structural advantage of being one person: nothing to navigate, nothing to trace up an org chart.

Section 2.5.3 then grants personal sites an allowance that stores and banks do not get:

Occasionally, you may encounter a website or content creator with a legitimate reason for anonymity. For example, personal websites may omit personal contact information such as an individual’s home address or phone number.

General Guidelines, section 2.5.3

No street address required, then. Identifiable and reachable, yes. Those are two different bars, and running them together is how people end up either publishing their home address or hiding behind a contact form with no name on it.

Section 3.4 names three sources of evidence a rater is told to weigh:

• What the website or content creators say about themselves
• What others say about the website or content creators
• What is visible on the page, including the Main Content and sections such as reviews and comments

General Guidelines, section 3.4

Only the first of those is under a publisher’s control. The second belongs to other people, and the only way to control it is to fake it, which section 3.3.5 has already declined to reward, since it scores an absent reputation as neutral. The third is whatever is actually on the page.

The section closes on a warning that is easy to skim past:

Important: The website or content creator may not be a trustworthy source if there is a clear conflict of interest.

General Guidelines, section 3.4

Google’s example is a manufacturer reviewing its own product. Generalise the shape (someone with a stake evaluating the thing they have a stake in) and it covers an affiliate link inside a “best of” list, a review written by the vendor’s own agency, and an undisclosed employment history sitting inside a software comparison. The document does not treat any of those as a footnote. It treats them as grounds for distrusting the source outright.

How to read the thing

Not as a ranking manual. Page 6 rules that out.

Read it instead as the most detailed public account anyone has of what a trained stranger, paid to be sceptical, is told to check when they land on a page cold. Read that way, the instructions for a small site come out short.

Be identifiable: a real name, attached to a real role, at an organisation that exists. Be reachable, which section 2.5.3 is careful to say does not mean publishing a home address. Separate what you have used from what you have only read about, because the document defines Experience and Expertise apart from each other and puts both underneath Trust. Put the conflict on the page before the reader finds it.

And if nobody has ever written about you, section 3.3.5 says that is worth nothing. Not minus something. Nothing. Which is also not an invitation to go and manufacture some.