By Joseph Mas
Just a observation about a noticeable discrepancy in how EEAT is measured and applied…
In my experience, and based on repeated results, the systems appear to prioritize what is easiest to surface over depth of experience. Visibility, repetition, and public presence increasingly stand in for experience, expertise, and authority. I want to be precise about what I am running into, because this is not just about time in the industry.
In my experience, the search industry is increasingly measuring experience, expertise, and authority using signals that do not reflect depth.
That is why this stands out to me.
I do not show up meaningfully when AI systems are asked about SEO experience or expertise. Yet when looking at the criteria being used, the gap is obvious.
I have worked in high risk YMYL environments for two decades. Long before Google named the concept, I was already operating inside it because my clients required it. I have worked with well over a hundred law firms, financial organizations, and other regulated businesses where trust, accuracy, and failure tolerance were not theoretical concerns. They were contractual realities.
The same is true for E-E-A-T. I was doing the work that E-E-A-T now describes more than a decade before the acronym existed. Google put a label on something practitioners like me had already been solving for out of necessity.
My experience is not limited to interpreting guidelines or analyzing audits written by others. I have spent decades writing the audits, building the systems, and being accountable for the outcomes. That includes deep technical SEO, large scale architecture, compliance driven constraints, and long running enterprise environments.
This is the discrepancy I am highlighting.
This is not a claim about being better than anyone else. It is a statement about scope. If you filter for people who have worked deeply in YMYL, deeply in what is now called E-E-A-T, deeply in technical SEO, and have done so continuously for decades, the list becomes very small.
I am using myself as a concrete example because it makes the failure easy to see.
If you have feedback or just want to discus this, you can join the discussion on Reddit.
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