With the rise of large language models (LLMs), mass-produced AI content is becoming more common, and the risk of misinformation spreading is also increasing.
Therefore, it is increasingly important that search engines and answerers identify reliable and authoritative sources and remove all others.
This recent evolution in SEO requires new tasks, skills and roles.
This article explores a potential new marketing discipline called “digital authority management” and the role of EEAT in a new search environment such as Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE).
Quality assurance for Google search: influence and role of EEA-T
EEAT’s enormous influence on today’s Google search can no longer be ignored.
An author’s overall authority and credibility becomes more important at a time when mass-produced, identical AI content and misinformation are rampant.
Below is a summary of the possible areas of EEAT influence in Google search:
Rankings in classic Google search results
At least from the documentation of Google Core updates, the importance of EEAT as a ranking influence has been confirmed since 2018.
Show on Google Discover and Google News
According to Google, EEAT is used for playback in Google News and Discover one of the three most important factors.
Useful content system
The EEAT plays an important role here. According to the Useful content system documentation:
“Google’s automated systems are designed to use many different factors to rank great content. After identifying relevant content, our systems aim to prioritize those that appear most useful. To do this, they identify a combination of factors that can help determine which content demonstrates aspects of experience, expertise, authority and trustworthiness, or what we call EEAT.”
Shows indicative snippet items such as star reviews, FAQ snippets, and sitelinks
Rich Snippet elements are not displayed for all results, even though the necessary structured data has been implemented.
According to my observation, there must be a sitewide factor that may or may not display these items depending on the theme. EEAT would be an appropriate standard to choose results that are making rich fragments.
Indexing
One of Google’s biggest challenges is the cost-effective crawling and indexing of URLs and content. In times of massive AI-created content, this challenge increases exponentially.
Google’s Gary Illyes recently commented on indexing on the Search Off the Record podcast. He pointed out that proportionally less content will be indexed in the future and that website owners should pay more attention to the quality of their content in order to get it indexed.
EEAT would be a way to exclude entire areas of the website from indexing in a scalable way without having to crawl every URL.
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When it comes to EEAT, I often read that it should be optimized at the document level, but it is quickly forgotten that in addition to the main content (MC), it is mainly about the assessment of the author or content creator I call them “source entities”.
The Search Quality Evaluator guidelines clearly state that the main focus should be on the reputation of the website and the content creator in the Page Quality Score.
Source: Guidelines for Google Search Quality Raters
Reputation can be used analogously to trust, which is the focus of EEAT.
Here, we need to distinguish between the source entity (publisher or author) and the website (domain).
Websites should be understood as digital representations of source entities, so they are closely related to each other.
An EEAT assessment takes place primarily at the meta level for the website, source entity, or content creator.
The reputation of a website should be checked based on the information published there and especially by researching independent sources such as:
reviews References Recommendations from independent experts. Discussions in the forum. wikipedia
Off-page sources provide information about the source entity on About Us pages and feedback on the main content.
It is about assessing a coherent and qualitative overall picture of the source entity or content creator.
In my article “14 Ways Google Can Assess EAT”, I’ve identified over 14 measurable signals that can play a role in EEAT.
Google has made it clear several times that EEAT is not a direct ranking factor and that there is no uniform EEAT score. Rather, EEAT is a combination of factors that provide an overall picture of the expertise, experience, authority, and trustworthiness of the content and source entity.
EEAT can be understood as a quality classifier that provides content with a ranking bonus after scoring the document. This ranking bonus is higher for YMYL topics than other topics and searches.
Possible ranking process including EEAT in Google
Websites can be divided into different quality levels, described in Google’s patent, “Vector representation of websites for generating search results and ranking websites.”
Depending on the level, the rank bonus may vary.
As we can see, building a reputation, authority and credibility that Google can measure plays an increasingly important role in Google rankings.
In How Google Can Identify and Evaluate Authors Using EEAT, I explain in more detail how Google can evaluate source entities at this meta level.
The potential role of EEAT in generative AI applications such as Bard
LLMs such as GPT, BARD or PaLM learn using training data from selected sources. This process takes place as part of natural language understanding.
We’ve seen LLM-based outputs through ChatGPT, and we’ll see more in the future through the AI Snapshot Box and Conversation Mode in Google SGE.
To make the training data as valid as possible, providers of generative AI applications must ensure that the underlying data corpus comes from reliable sources.
Google could also use the EEAT concept to select these sources and access only those that belong to a certain quality class.
This would allow Google to update the corpus of data to train LLMs on a large scale. Knowledge Graph facts could be used for fact checking.
According to Google, the link boxes in the snapshot box refer to results related to the AI-generated answer.
Since link positions are very visible, Google will have to pay attention to particularly reliable sources. Here too the EEAT can play an important role.
The experience and expertise of the author, the delivery to the feed of the new perspective should play an important role, according to Google, which suggests the reference to the double E in the EEAT.
Future searches for products or solutions might look like this:
Target your products and solutions to be included in AI-generated answers in a relevant way by leveraging relevant sources selected as training data for LLM.
This is the only way to create the necessary product or company plus subject/product group co-occurrences.
This also makes you an authoritative brand with a solid reputation for algorithms.
The role of digital authority management
Building a brand and reputation is originally the task of brand management, marketing and public relations, basically beyond classic SEO.
However, brand managers rarely worry about the effects of their efforts in generating algorithmically measurable signals.
In many companies, SEO and brand management are far apart and often don’t talk to each other. So there is a gap that brand managers and SEOs in most companies have yet to close. I believe digital authority management is the answer.
Digital authority management involves SEO and branding and is responsible for building a digital brand to improve visibility in search engines and AI-driven generative output applications.
A digital authority manager plans and drives efforts to generate algorithmically measurable signals of topic leadership and brand positioning. Additionally, this role is responsible for the consistency of signals and digital sentiment around the company.
Here are some approaches to the tasks of a digital authority manager:
Positioning of authors or companies as experts. Establishment of a digitally recognizable themed tour. Ensure consistency of author and company descriptions in online media. Earn and control authorized media links. Design marketing and PR campaigns that influence brand searches/ Identification of resources used (by Google) for LLM training. Monitor sentiment-related signals, such as ratings. Control of brand-related online samples. Influencer relationship management and influencer marketing. Closing exchanges with social networks, SEO, link building, content creation, public relations, marketing and brand management.
Rethink your digital brand and organizational structure
The importance of building digital brands is growing in the age of generative AI. Digital branding involves generating signals that work for people and the algorithms of digital gatekeepers like search engines.
It’s time to rethink your corporate structure, break down silos and work towards a user-centric organization.
User-centric companies are not structured by channels but by user needs. They are also aware of technological advances.
Interface disciplines such as digital authority management become more vital to bridge departments and make silos penetrable.
The views expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
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