What an E-E-A-T Checker Actually Reads in Your HTML

Most "E-E-A-T" advice is vibes. It tells you to "build authority" and "demonstrate expertise" without a single concrete thing to put in your code. My E-E-A-T checker does the opposite. It reads one page's raw HTML and tells you which of seven specific, machine-readable trust signals are present and which are missing — with the exact reason for each verdict.

What This Tool Actually Checks

Paste a URL and the checker fetches the page's HTML — the same HTML Google's crawler and an AI assistant parse — and runs seven heuristics. No JavaScript is executed; it reads what's in the source, because that's what most crawlers index first.

The seven signals:

• Named author — a rel="author" link, a <meta name="author"> with a real value, a visible byline, or a Person/author node in your JSON-LD.
• Publish / update date — datePublished/dateModified in JSON-LD, a <time> element, article:published_time meta, or a visible date in a recognised format.
• Outbound citations — at least one link to an external domain that isn't a social share button. Content with zero outbound links reads as unsupported.
• Organization identity — Organization/LocalBusiness schema, an og:site_name, or about/company/copyright markers in the page.
• Expertise signals — an about or team link, credential language ("certified", "chartered", "years of experience"), or "written by / reviewed by" attribution.
• Trust pages — links to privacy, terms, or contact.
• First-hand detail — concrete numbers, named people, direct quotes, and first-person experience language ("we tested", "in our tests"). This is the one that separates original content from generic copy.

You get a score out of seven, a verdict, and a per-signal pass/fail with the concrete reason it passed or failed.

Why This Differs From Generic SEO Tools

Most SEO audits give you a green tick for "has an author" the moment any author string exists anywhere. They don't tell you the date is baked into an image where no crawler can read it, or that your "sources" are three share buttons, or that your trust pages exist but aren't linked from this page.

That's the real gap. E-E-A-T is a code problem disguised as a content problem. A human looks at your beautifully designed article and sees the author photo, the date, the references. A crawler reads the HTML and finds none of it, because the date is in a sprite image, the byline is a styled <div> with no semantic markup, and the references are plain text with no <a> tags.

This checker reads the page the way the machine does. The "first-hand detail" signal in particular is something a generic checker won't touch — it looks for the markers of original work (figures, named people, quotes, "we measured" language) versus content that reads as scraped or AI-spun. That's a real E-E-A-T differentiator Google's rater guidelines lean on, and almost nobody tests for it.

What You'll See When You Run It

You enter a blog post or service page URL. Within a second or two you get a score like 4 / 7 and a checklist. A typical result on a small business blog post:

• Named author — fail ("No named author found — no rel=author, byline, meta author, or Person in JSON-LD").
• Publish / update date — pass ("visible publication date").
• Outbound citations — fail ("No links to external sources").
• Organization identity — pass ("og:site_name set; company identification in page").
• Expertise signals — fail ("No about/team link or credential language").
• Trust pages — pass ("Links found: privacy, contact").
• First-hand detail — fail ("Reads as generic — few concrete numbers, named people, or first-hand markers").

Each line is a to-do. The fails above are a morning's work: add a real byline with semantic markup, link out to two authoritative sources, add an author bio, and rewrite one section with a specific number and a named example.

What It Does NOT Do

It checks one page, not your whole site. It reads static HTML, so signals injected by client-side JavaScript after load won't be seen — which is exactly the point if your byline only renders in JS, because Google may not see it either. And a perfect 7/7 does not guarantee rankings: E-E-A-T is one input among relevance, helpfulness, speed, and links. This tool removes the trust objections that quietly hold a good page back. It doesn't write the good page for you.

Who Should Run This

Anyone whose content gets passed over and can't see why — bloggers, consultants, agencies, anyone publishing in a "your money or your life" space (health, finance, legal) where trust signals carry the most weight. If you've written something genuinely good and it isn't ranking or getting cited, run it through here before you blame the algorithm. The missing signal is usually invisible and cheap to fix.

Run your page through the E-E-A-T checker and see which of the seven signals your HTML is actually showing. If the gap turns out to be site-wide rather than one page, book the full website audit and I'll map it across every page.