E-E-A-T, translated

E-E-A-T — experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness — comes from Google's search quality guidelines. It was written to describe how human raters judge pages. It transfers surprisingly well to how a model decides whether naming you is safe, with one important adjustment: the evidence has to be parseable.

A human rater can look at your website and infer that you are a real dentist. A model needs something it can extract.

Experience — did you actually do this?

Say so specifically, with detail only a practitioner would include. "We have installed about 400 of these across the Central West, and the common failure is the seal on the return line" is experience. "We are passionate about quality installation" is not.

Expertise — who is talking?

Put a real human name on editorial content, and give that person a page with credentials. Then connect them with schema:

"author": {
  "@type": "Person",
  "name": "Sam Whitely",
  "url": "https://fernway.co/team/sam-whitely",
  "jobTitle": "Founder",
  "sameAs": ["https://au.linkedin.com/in/samwhitely"]
}

Anonymous content is not disqualified, but on any topic touching money or health it is a meaningful handicap.

Authoritativeness — does anyone else agree?

This one you cannot fully control. It is other sites referring to you, your name appearing in industry contexts, being listed where a practitioner would be listed. What you can control: making sure that when someone does mention you, they can find a canonical page to point at, and that your name matches.

Trustworthiness — can you be held accountable?

The most mechanical of the four, and the easiest to fix in an afternoon:

• A physical address, if you have one
• A working phone number and email, not just a form
• Real pricing, or an honest explanation of why pricing varies
• Clear refund, delivery and privacy terms
• Dates on content, and updated dates that are true
• HTTPS everywhere

What does not work

Fabricated review counts, invented author personas, stock-photo team pages and schema claiming things the page does not show. These fail in the same way with search engines and models: they get discovered, and the correction costs more than the shortcut saved.