09/02/2026
This week's plain-English explainer. E-E-A-T is the framework Google and the AI engines use to decide whether to trust a page — Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust.
Three of those four can be manufactured. Anyone can claim expertise. Authority can be purchased through directory placements. Trust signals can be installed by a developer in an afternoon. Experience cannot be faked, because experience is what you personally did.
That distinction matters more this month than it did last month. On August 25 Google Cloud launched Gemini Enterprise for Legal, with Cleary, Freshfields, Weil and Williams and Connolly as launch firms. Google is training the legal profession to ask Gemini its questions, which means your discoverability now runs through a machine reading your website for evidence you have actually done the work.
On a mediator's page that looks concrete. Not "extensive experience in family law," but 1,100 mediations since 1998, 340 of them high-conflict custody, in the Eleventh and Seventeenth Judicial Circuits. Not "we handle complex cases," but the case type, the jurisdiction, the year and the outcome in your own words. Not a bio — a record. A competitor can copy your service pages tonight. He cannot copy twenty-eight years on the bench.
