Course It
On December 15, 2022, Google published an update to the guidelines human raters use to judge the quality of search results. Until then the criteria were called E-A-T: expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. The update added one letter at the front: E, for Experience.1
The new question is simple: was this content created with some degree of experience? Did the person who wrote it use the product, visit the place, do the thing they describe?
Expertise and experience are two things
Google gave its own example: if you want to know how to fill out your tax return correctly, you need an expert. If you want to choose software to file it with, you might get more from a forum discussion between people who've tried a few.
The difference is subtle and important. An expert knows how things are supposed to work. Someone who's done it knows how they work in practice: what gets stuck, what's unnecessary, and what nobody writes in the instructions.
Why it matters more now
General information is now one question away. When information is available to everyone, what stays rare is the experience of someone who went through it: the mistakes, the decisions, and the story behind the method.
And that's what people look for when they really want to learn: someone who was there, and who can tell them what they'd do differently.
Information belongs to everyone. Experience belongs to the people who lived it.
And the other side
A caveat: Google's guidelines don't directly set the order of results. They're used by raters who evaluate the search systems. And experience on its own isn't enough either: one person's experience can be an exception, not a rule.
Expertise hasn't gone anywhere, and Google describes trust as the most important of the four letters. Experience without self-checking is a story. Experience with thought is knowledge.2
Our take
What you went through yourself is what can't be copied.
You can summarize a book, translate an article, gather information from ten sources. What happened to you, what you learned the hard way, is only yours.
What this says about you
If you've worked with something for years, you hold exactly what the web is starting to look for: first-hand knowledge. It's worth asking where it lives today: in your head, in conversations, and in stories that disappear after a day.
Google added one letter to its criteria. You've had it for years.
