How to Build the Kind of Trust Google (and Your Customers) Actually Respect

There’s a concept in SEO that most agencies write about for other marketers. This article is written for you — someone running a business who doesn’t have time to become a search expert.

It’s called E-E-A-T. It sounds technical, but it comes down to something you probably think about already: what makes a stranger trust your business?

Google asks exactly the same question. And over the past few years, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews have started asking it too.

What is E-E-A-T?

E-E-A-T is the framework Google uses to assess whether a website deserves to rank well. The letters stand for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.

Google employs thousands of external reviewers who evaluate search results against published guidelines. It’s not a score you can fill in on a form. It’s more a description of what Google is trying to find when it decides whether a page is worth trusting.

And the most important of the four? Trustworthiness. Google’s published Search Quality Rater Guidelines state directly that trust is the most important member of the E-E-A-T family. The other three don’t compensate for its absence.

Why it matters for a small business

You might think this is something for big brands or news publishers. It isn’t.

The same rater guidelines are explicit that missing or hidden contact information, and a missing or unhelpful “About” page, are reasons to rate a page as low quality — particularly for a site that sells something or gives advice. Those aren’t obscure SEO details. They’re the basics that a lot of small business websites still get wrong, not because owners don’t care, but because nobody told them it mattered.

And these are exactly the signals Google and AI tools look for when deciding whether your business deserves to be recommended.

The part most E-E-A-T articles miss

Here’s where things have shifted in recent years.

Ahrefs’ analysis of 75,000 brands (2025) found that mentions of your business on other websites correlate more strongly with AI search visibility than the number of links pointing to your site. That’s a meaningful departure from how traditional SEO worked.

Put simply: what Google judges as trustworthy is largely what ChatGPT and Perplexity choose to cite. But how often you’re mentioned outside your own website now matters more than how many people link to it.

That’s actually good news for a small local business. You don’t need to build hundreds of backlinks. You need to become known as trustworthy in your industry and your area.

Ten things you can check today

This isn’t a theoretical list. These are the signals that actually influence how Google and AI tools assess your business.

1. Contact information and basic transparency

Your website should make it easy for anyone to verify that you’re a real, accountable business. That means a named owner or team, a physical address, a working phone number, an email address, and — if you operate as a registered company — your company registration number.

This isn’t just good SEO practice. In many markets it’s a legal requirement: in Sweden, where we’re based, the Companies Act (2005:551), chapter 28 requires a limited company to show its full name, registration number and registered office on its website, and the E-Commerce Act (2002:562) adds name, address and email for anyone selling online. Check what applies where you operate — we explain the practical implications, we’re not legal advisors.

Practical check: look at your footer and your contact page. If a stranger couldn’t confirm in 30 seconds that your business is real and reachable, something needs fixing.

2. A real About page

A page that says “We’re a passionate team dedicated to excellence” with a stock photo of hands around a table does more harm than good. Google looks for evidence that real people are behind a website.

That means: the owner or founder by name, an actual photo, how long the business has been running, and what it concretely does. Not marketing language. Just the information a potential customer actually wants before they pick up the phone to call someone they’ve never heard of.

3. A complete, active Google Business Profile

Your Google Business Profile is probably the most underused asset a local business has. Whitespark’s Local Search Ranking Factors 2026, a survey of 47 local SEO specialists published in November 2025, put Google Business Profile signals at roughly 32% of ranking weight in Google’s local pack.

The single most important decision you make on it: your primary category. Choosing the wrong one is one of the most common reasons local businesses rank poorly, regardless of how strong everything else is.

Beyond category: show your actual address (even if you’re a mobile business that goes to customers), keep your hours accurate, and upload real photos regularly.

4. Fresh reviews, every month

Having 50 good reviews doesn’t help much if the most recent one is eight months old. Sterling Sky’s case study on review count and ranking (updated 2025) found that how many reviews you’ve collected this month matters more than your lifetime total — one client’s rankings fell away after just 18 days without a new review.

A practical target: five or more new Google reviews per month. Build it into your workflow — ask every customer at the end of a job.

Reply to every review within 24 hours too. Sterling Sky has documented that keywords in owner responses get indexed and contribute to relevance signals, while keywords in the customer’s own review text don’t work the same way. Write each reply as if a potential customer is reading it, not just the person who left it.

5. A real address showing on Google

There’s a common misconception among tradespeople and mobile businesses: that you should hide your address on Google because you don’t have an office that receives customers.

Sterling Sky tested this directly with real clients. Hiding an address caused rankings to drop, and they recovered when the address was reinstated — repeated on a second location with the same result. Show your actual address. It’s a signal that you’re a real, verifiable business.

6. Proof of expertise in your service pages

A page that says “We offer plumbing services in Bristol” isn’t a credible page. A page that explains what a pressure system fault actually means for a homeowner, how you diagnose it, and what the fix involves is a different thing entirely.

What Google calls Experience signals are the details that could only come from someone who has actually done the work. Your own photos from real jobs. Specific technical observations. Genuine customer stories with a name and location, where the customer’s happy to be quoted.

This is also exactly the content AI tools tend to cite when recommending businesses. In the research paper GEO: Generative Engine Optimization from Princeton and Georgia Tech, presented at ACM KDD 2024, adding concrete statistics, quotations and named sources produced the largest measurable lifts in visibility across generative search engines. Generic summarising produced none.

7. Consistent information about your business across the web

Google, Bing, Apple Maps, Yelp, Facebook, and industry-specific directories all pull information about your business. If your address looks different in three places, or the phone number on one listing doesn’t match your website, that inconsistency sends an unclear signal.

This is called NAP consistency: Name, Address, Phone. It carries less weight than it did five years ago — citation signals come in at around 7% in the Whitespark survey above. But it’s still a baseline trust signal, and those same directories are where AI tools go for local business data.

Spend half an hour checking that your information is accurate on the platforms your customers actually see.

8. Structured data on your website

Structured data — also called schema markup — is a way of telling Google exactly what your website is about in a machine-readable format. It doesn’t directly boost your ranking. But it helps Google understand what you do, and it makes it easier for AI tools to categorise and cite you.

For a local business, the most important things to have are the right business type (Plumber, Dentist, LegalService, and so on), your address and opening hours, and if possible an FAQ schema. FAQ schema no longer produces FAQ boxes in Google’s results, but both Google and AI tools read it to understand your answers. If you want to understand how schema works in practice, our guide to schema markup covers it in plain language.

9. Real mentions of your business outside your website

This is the link between E-E-A-T and AI search visibility. Mentions of your business on external sites — whether they link to you or just name you — now correlate more strongly with AI visibility than your backlink count. That’s the conclusion from the same Ahrefs study of 75,000 brands mentioned above.

It could be a piece in a local publication, a thread in an industry forum, a YouTube review, a LinkedIn article you’ve written, or appearing in a local “best of” roundup. Everything that puts your name in circulation outside your own website builds credibility.

It takes time. But it’s also what’s genuinely hard for a competitor to copy.

10. Keep your domain and update your content

Expired domains are a real vulnerability. In November 2025, Swedish broadcaster TV4 reported on fraudsters buying up lapsed domains from closed or dormant businesses, keeping the original company name and contact details, and using them to sell dubious health products. Letting a domain expire can cost you your credibility without you knowing it happened.

Keep your domain renewed. Update key pages at least quarterly. Ahrefs’ study of 17 million AI citations (July 2025) found that content cited by AI tools is on average 25% fresher than what ranks organically in Google. Fresh content isn’t just SEO hygiene. It signals that your business is active.

Where to start

Look at this list and ask yourself honestly: which of these ten have you not done?

Contact information and transparency takes 20 minutes and is non-negotiable. A review process takes a week to set up and typically shows up in rankings within a couple of months. A better About page can be done in an afternoon.

You don’t need to do everything at once. But you do need to know where you stand.

Not sure how your website looks to Google right now? We’re happy to take a look. Get in touch and we’ll go through it together.

Frequently asked questions about E-E-A-T and Google trust