Content & E-E-A-T rules
What the engines reward in the words themselves: content written for people, by someone with real experience, kept current.
Reviewed Oct 30, 2026 · next review Nov 2, 2026
Impact split
- High impact 2
- Medium impact 3
- Low impact 0
Engines covered
Rules in this area that apply to each engine
- Google 5 of 5
- Bing 3 of 5
- ChatGPT 2 of 5
- Perplexity 2 of 5
- Gemini 2 of 5
- Claude 1 of 5
High impact 2
Publish original, first-hand content that adds something the rest of the web hasn't said
Google's helpful content guidance and its 2026 generative AI guide both say the same thing: content created for people with first-hand experience wins, and recycled summaries do not.
Don't mass-produce pages for query variations, with AI or without it
Google's scaled content abuse policy covers many pages generated primarily to manipulate rankings, and it names generative AI used without adding value as an example.
Medium impact 3
Show who wrote it, how it was made and why it exists, with real bylines and author pages
Google's Who, How and Why framework asks for accurate bylines, an explanation of how content was produced and a purpose beyond attracting search traffic.
Don't host third-party content that exists only to borrow your domain's ranking strength
Google's site reputation policy targets third-party content published mainly to exploit the host site's ranking signals, such as coupon or casino sections on news sites.
Refresh key pages with real updates on a schedule; never just bump the date
An Ahrefs analysis of about 17 million AI citations found cited URLs were roughly 26% fresher than organic results, with ChatGPT and Perplexity showing the strongest preference and AI Overviews the weakest.
No longer works 2
Stop targeting keyword density or a minimum word count
Do insteadWrite until the question is fully answered, then stop
Stop changing publish dates without changing the content
Do insteadChange dates only when the content materially changes