The Trust Score: Auditing Your Marketing Copy for EEAT and Verifiable Claims

Most marketing copy is never audited for trust.

It gets reviewed for tone, brand voice, conversion potential, sometimes for SEO. It rarely gets reviewed for whether a skeptical reader could reasonably believe it, verify it, or rely on it without feeling misled. That omission doesn’t usually cause immediate harm. It causes something quieter.

The copy keeps working, just not as well as it should. Rankings soften. Conversions plateau. Sales conversations start later in the funnel. Prospects arrive with more questions and less confidence. Over time, teams compensate by adding more copy, more proof points, more urgency.

The underlying issue remains untouched.

Trust is not binary. It accumulates, erodes, and compounds. And most teams have no way to measure it.

What I mean by a “trust score”

This is not a metric you’ll find in analytics dashboards.

A trust score is a qualitative assessment of how defensible your marketing claims are when read by someone who is informed, skeptical, and not predisposed to believe you. It answers questions like:

Would this copy hold up if someone tried to verify it?
Does it reflect real experience, or only positioning?
Are claims specific enough to be meaningful, but restrained enough to be accurate?
Is authority demonstrated, or merely asserted?

When Google talks about E-E-A-T, this is the layer most teams miss. Experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness are not abstract values. They show up in sentence-level decisions.

Where trust breaks down in real-world copy

I’ve audited a lot of marketing content over the years. Patterns repeat.

The most common failure is not false claims. It’s unsupported ones.

Statements like “industry-leading,” “best-in-class,” or “trusted by thousands” appear everywhere. They are not necessarily untrue. They are simply unanchored. When nothing in the surrounding copy explains why a reader should believe them, they function as noise.

Another common issue is borrowed authority. Teams reference standards, research, or outcomes indirectly without ever pointing to the source. The implication is that authority exists somewhere off the page. Readers are expected not to look too closely.

That assumption is increasingly risky. Search engines and users alike are better at detecting when authority is implied rather than demonstrated.

Experience is the hardest part to fake

The extra “E” in E-E-A-T matters more than most people admit.

Experience shows up in copy when the writer knows where things go wrong. It shows up in constraints, caveats, and tradeoffs. It sounds like someone who has seen a strategy fail, not just succeed.

You can usually tell within a few paragraphs whether a piece of content is written from lived exposure or from synthesis alone. The former acknowledges friction. The latter smooths everything out.

That smoothness is a trust liability.

In my experience, the most credible copy often includes sentences that marketing teams are tempted to cut because they feel less aspirational. Those sentences signal honesty. They tell the reader, “We understand the limits of this.”

Verifiable claims do not weaken persuasion

There is a persistent belief that specificity reduces flexibility. In reality, it increases credibility.

A claim that can be checked does more work than one that cannot. Even if a reader never follows a citation, the presence of verifiable detail changes how the copy is read. It shifts the tone from promotional to informational.

This matters for SEO, but it matters even more for conversion. People are more willing to accept persuasive framing once they believe the foundation is solid.

The mistake I see most often is teams treating verification as something that belongs in footnotes or legal disclaimers. In strong copy, verification is woven into the narrative. It doesn’t interrupt flow. It supports it.

How I actually audit copy for trust

When I review a page, I don’t start with keywords or layout. I read it straight through, as a reader who wants to believe it but doesn’t yet.

I mark every sentence that makes a claim about outcomes, expertise, or authority. Then I ask a simple question: how would someone know this is true?

Sometimes the answer is clear. Sometimes it’s implied. Often it’s missing.

I also look for asymmetry. Real experience is uneven. If every benefit is clean, universal, and unqualified, something is off. Trustworthy copy allows for context. It acknowledges when something depends on conditions.

Another thing I pay attention to is authorship. Anonymous or generic bylines weaken trust, especially for complex or regulated topics. Readers want to know who is speaking and why they should listen.

E-E-A-T is not an SEO checklist

This is where teams get tripped up.

They treat E-E-A-T as a set of signals to satisfy rather than a standard to write toward. They add author bios, slap on credentials, and assume the work is done.

Those elements help, but they don’t substitute for substance. Search systems are evaluating patterns across content. So are human readers.

If your site consistently publishes copy that avoids specifics, overstates certainty, or obscures sources, no amount of structural optimization will fully compensate.

Trust erodes faster than it builds

One unsupported claim rarely sinks a page. A pattern of them eventually does.

I’ve seen sites where performance declined slowly despite strong backlinks and solid technical foundations. When we reviewed the copy, the issue wasn’t accuracy so much as overconfidence. The language had drifted away from what the organization could reliably support.

Rewriting those pages didn’t involve making them less persuasive. It involved making them more precise. Traffic recovered gradually. Conversions improved sooner.

That lag is normal. Trust takes time to reestablish, whether you’re dealing with users or search engines.

What changes when teams take trust seriously

When trust becomes a design constraint, copy changes in subtle but important ways.

Claims get narrower. Sources become visible. Experience replaces abstraction. Writers ask better questions before drafting. Legal reviews become faster because fewer issues surface late.

Most importantly, content starts to age better. Pages require fewer emergency updates. They stay relevant longer. They withstand scrutiny when conditions change.

That durability is what most teams are actually trying to buy when they invest in content.

A practical way to start

You don’t need a full rewrite to begin.

Pick one high-traffic page. Read it as if you were seeing it for the first time. Identify every claim that asks for trust. For each one, decide whether it is demonstrated, supported, or merely stated.

That exercise alone usually reveals where confidence is earned and where it’s assumed.

What holds up over time

Marketing copy that performs well in the short term often relies on momentum. Copy that performs well over time relies on credibility.

E-E-A-T is not a trend to chase. It’s a description of how trust works when attention is scarce and scrutiny is high. Teams that internalize that tend to write differently. Not louder. Clearer.

That clarity is what scales.