There Is No E-E-A-T Score. Be Careful With Anyone Selling One.
Every so often a lab offers a “proprietary panel”: a saliva test, a wellness score, a single number out of 100 that claims to summarize something as layered as inflammation or hormone balance.
No CLIA validation behind the number. No published reference range, and no peer review of whatever the algorithm inside the black box is actually doing.
You know how to read that pitch. The number sounds precise.
The precision got manufactured somewhere upstream, and behind the glossy report sits a claim dressed up as a measurement.
The same pitch is landing in independent practices now, wearing a term you’ve probably seen in a proposal. E-E-A-T. Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust.
A vendor hands you a scorecard (your site scores 62/100 on E-E-A-T, up from 41 last quarter) and talks about it like a lab value Google reported back to them.
Google didn’t. Google has never issued that score, has no checker that produces it, and runs no E-E-A-T algorithm against your website.
What E-E-A-T actually is
E-E-A-T comes from Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines, a document written for the human contractors who evaluate search results as part of testing and training Google’s ranking systems.
Those raters use it to judge whether a page looks like it came from someone who knows what they’re talking about.
Nothing in it gets run against your dermatology practice’s site in real time, and there’s no E-E-A-T module inside the ranking algorithm spitting out a score. Google’s said so directly, more than once.
So a vendor can’t check your “E-E-A-T score” the way a lab checks your A1C, because there’s no such value sitting anywhere to be checked.
What they can do is look at a page and form a judgment about whether it reads as credible (a reasonable exercise, and often a useful one).
The trouble starts when that judgment gets packaged as an objective measurement pulled out of Google’s own systems, the same way a wellness panel packages a marketing opinion as a diagnostic result.
Claims aren’t evidence, on a website or in a chart
There’s a parallel here to something every physician already screens for, the gap between a patient telling you they’re in excellent health and a physical exam confirming it.
A website that writes “Dr. Patel has over 20 years of experience and is a trusted expert in family medicine” has made a claim and demonstrated nothing.
Writing the word “expert” into an author bio doesn’t produce expertise, any more than a chart note reading “patient is compliant” substitutes for checking the labs.
For a search engine trying to judge a page the way a skeptical human would, the evidence looks more like this:
- Third-party verification. Reviews on Google and Healthgrades that a two-physician family practice didn’t write itself. A hospital credentialing page that independently confirms a physician’s board certification.
- Specificity that’s hard to fake. A condition page written by an OBGYN that explains what she actually tells patients about managing PCOS. A paragraph that could describe any practice in any city fails here.
- Consistency across the web. The same name, credentials, and practice details appearing the same way on the practice site, the hospital directory, and the state licensing board.
- Design and structure that don’t look assembled overnight. A logo, a real photo of the physician, a site somebody has clearly been maintaining. A template with the placeholder text swapped out last week reads like exactly what it is.
Most on-page “expertise” claims are exactly that – claims. The only signals worth trusting are the ones that exist independently of the page making them.
Same instinct as refusing to take a patient’s self-report as a diagnosis. You go looking for corroboration.
What the honest version of this work looks like
An honest audit of a practice’s web presence hands you a list of which claims on the site are backed by something a stranger could verify and which ones are just sitting there.
Does the dermatology clinic’s “board certified” claim link to a source that confirms it?
Do the reviews on the Google Business Profile match what the front desk actually hears from patients, or did a burst of five-star reviews show up in one suspicious week last spring?
Is there a named physician behind the content on the site, or a “Medical Team” byline that could belong to anyone?
You end up with a punch list and no percentage, the same way a chart audit produces a list of documentation gaps rather than a wellness score.
So if a vendor’s report is one number with no visible methodology behind it, ask what the number is built from.
If the honest answer is “a proprietary formula,” you’ve heard that answer before, in a supplement ad.
Check your own claims the way a stranger would
Pull up your own website and your Google Business Profile the way you’d pull up a chart before signing it. Then go claim by claim.
Credentials, years in practice, specialties, awards. For each one, ask whether a stranger could confirm it somewhere else on the internet inside thirty seconds.
Where the answer is no, you’ve found an unverified claim sitting in the spot where evidence should be.
That isn’t necessarily a lie. It’s still a gap, and fixing it page by page is worth more than any report that hands you a number and calls it your E-E-A-T score.
Questions practices ask about this
A vendor showed us a 62 out of 100 E-E-A-T score. Should I still hire them?
Not on the strength of that number alone. Ask for the itemized version behind it, meaning which claims on your site a stranger could verify, which pages carry no named author, and which directory listings disagree with each other. A capable firm can do real work and still package it badly. If they can hand you that list, the score was just wrapping. If they can't produce one, there's nothing underneath it.
Can I check our own claims myself, or do I need to hire someone?
You can do the first pass yourself in an afternoon. Open your website and your Google Business Profile, write down every credential, award, and years-in-practice claim, then try to confirm each one from an independent source like your state license lookup, a hospital directory, or the certifying board's verification page. Hiring help usually makes more sense for the repair work, since rewriting thin pages and correcting mismatched listings takes recurring hours.
Which part of this should I do first?
Start with the claims a patient or an AI assistant would try to confirm first, such as board certification, credentials, and years in practice. Anything a stranger can't verify somewhere independent goes to the top of the list. Correct the listings that contradict each other next. Rewriting thin pages and adding named author bylines can follow, since they're slower work.
What actually happens if I leave the unverified claims alone?
Nothing sudden, and no penalty notice ever arrives. The trouble shows up slowly, when a patient or an AI assistant tries to confirm your board certification and finds only your own website saying so. That makes you easier to pass over than a nearby practice whose credential also appears on the licensing board and a hospital page. Inconsistent listings tend to sit there until somebody goes looking for them.
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