You can look at Google’s longstanding E-E-A-T principles like a heavy set of responsibilities on your shoulders as a local business owner or marketer. But I bet you a side of onion rings that you’ll have more success (and even more fun) if you flip this dynamic to see much of it as a collaborative effort with your customers.
Specifically, Google has never loved customer content (like reviews!) more than they do now. Walk over to a local diner with me today and I’ll show you what’s on the menu for local search marketing success in the future we’re all watching roll out together.
Viewing E-E-A-T in a new light for local business marketing
Let’s start with a comparison of seeing E-E-A-T in a traditional way (all on your plate) vs. a She ATE approach (meaning you aced this marketing by partnering up with your customers).
| Tired E-E-A-T | Wired She ATE victory! |
| Experience – I’ve got to prove my first-hand experience with what I do/sell | Experience – My customers’ experiences are the ones other customers will trust most |
| Expertise – I’ve got to prove my professional skills in my field | Expertise – My community’s evaluation of my skills drives business |
| Authoritativeness – I’ve got to build my prominence as a local authority | Authoritativeness – My neighbors and local business peers will vouch for my authority online if I engage well |
| Trustworthiness – I’ve got to prove to Google’s bots that my business can be trusted | Trustworthiness – My city’s content is being tokenized by AI, including everything locals write about whether they trust my business |
Don’t get me wrong: all those tasks in the left-hand column are still on your plate, but bringing your community to the table can have the effect of turning a tired old spud into a loaded, twice-baked potato. It can give you some extra zip to re-envision traditional E-E-A-T signals as a community effort. Here’s how and why:
Experience
Even short Google Business Profile (GBP) reviews tell a dynamic story. The above review features all of the following hallmarks of authentic experience:
- The reviewer is a Local Guide who has written more than 200 reviews and uploaded more than 80 photos. This signals that this isn’t their first rodeo – they’ve had lots of practice reviewing businesses in the community.
- The overall rating is a shorthand signal of satisfaction.
- The date (a month ago) indicates a very recent experience; did you know that 67% of consumers prioritize recent reviews over average star ratings in choosing a local business to transact with?
- A price range is provided, helping other consumers know whether this is an experience they can afford.
- The text portion of the review mentions that they dined here to check it off a list of restaurants they wanted to experience, indicating that this is a community member who dines out regularly.
- Given that this is a plant-based restaurant, the text has value in describing the experience of someone who isn’t typically used to eating vegan meals.
- The text highlights particular dishes the reviewer most enjoyed.
- The text and ratings portions of the review evaluate the helpfulness of the staff, the quality of service, the food, cleanliness of the premises, atmosphere, and noise level.
- The legitimacy of the experience is substantially validated by the presence of photos the diner took while at the restaurant.
- At least one other potential customer has validated the usefulness of this patron’s experience to the public by clicking the ‘heart’ icon to show they like the review.
As I mentioned, just this one review covers a ton of experience-based information.
Why does this matter?
There are two big reasons to care about consumer experiences in this context.
- 60% of customers trust what other customers say about your brand over what your brand says about itself.
This eye-opening stat from GatherUp’s major consumer review survey demonstrates why, when it comes to experience, customers prioritize the lived experiences of peers over any claims your business can make about providing a great service.
- Google’s Conversational AI will need to quickly get better at scraping individual reviews
Google’s AI Mode (which is its attempt to compete with ChatGPT) is currently capable of summarizing ratings and review count from the Google Business Profile review database, as shown above.
However, the product currently seems incapable of scraping individual GBP reviews. Even when prompted, it continues to summarize:
While summaries driven by your customers’ reviews have some value, all of my local SEO colleagues I’ve talked to have expressed some degree of dissatisfaction with a product that paraphrases review content instead of actually showing it. I predict that switches will be flipped in the future to directly source review content in order to satisfy AI Mode users. At that point, the individual experiences of your customers will get the showcase they deserve, but for now, you need to think in terms of your overall body of reviews supporting these summaries.
How to collaborate with your community on Experience
Here’s your checklist:
- First and foremost, provide a great real-world experience.
- Back that up with a useful, informative, friction-free online experience based on publishing answers to your community’s FAQs, accurate contact and open hours information, and accessible human help.
- Combine email and text-based review requests for a maximum response rate.
- Send reminders, because the #1 reason customers don’t write more reviews is that they forget to.
- Respond to your reviews – a lack of responses discourages 14% of your audience from writing reviews.
- Be sure your review requests highlight how much you would appreciate photos and videos from the customer; nothing validates a genuine experience like visual proofs!
Expertise
There’s a reason even this early-stages version of Google’s AI Mode is prioritizing GBP star ratings. As a refresher, these ratings are an average of all the reviews a local business had received since it first got a Google Business Profile, and they can be thought of as the most succinct shorthand for whether a city thinks any local business is actually an expert at what it does.
Why does this matter?
The fine details of local expertise exist within the text of reviews (like the above). Just this one review checks off that:
- A 10+ year vegan diner confirms the quality of the food here.
- The staff is perceived as having expertise and excitement about their goods and services.
- Care has been taken to provide an appropriate facility and atmosphere for dining.
These bullet points demonstrate brand expertise in the very aspects other customers will care about most. Regardless of your industry, formal accreditations and licenses are a part of the picture of your expertise, but real consumer experiences should be highly valued, as well.
Right now, Google is citing other sources (like Yelp, online news articles, lifestyle magazines, professional review sites like Michelin, etc.) when I ask whether this particular diner is an expert at crafting vegan milkshakes. Given Google’s history of continuously finding new ways to preference its own content, I predict we’ll eventually see GBP reviews directly sourced in Google’s AI Mode and AI Overviews.
How to collaborate with your community on Expertise
High average star ratings and a high degree of expertise specificity result from:
- Focusing on perfecting the details of real-world consumer experiences; invest all you can in staff hiring and training practices including expert complaint escalation workflows, maintaining premises that are clean, comfortable, functional, and appropriate, and upholding customer-centric satisfaction guarantees
- Investing in review request specificity. Don’t just ask for reviews with generic requests. Prompt patrons with requests that highlight that you would appreciate their take on individual aspects of your business such as a hot menu item, patio dining, or the way they were greeted by your staff.
Authoritativeness
Historically, developing online authority for local brands has hinged on earning links and unstructured citations (third-party mentions of your business), and these foundational tasks remain as important as ever in 2025. What doesn’t get enough attention is the fact that some percentage of your customers in every town and city are either online publishers, themselves, or have influence on local media. In the above screenshot, the first YouTube video stems from a food vlogger and the second from a professional news + lifestyle program. Both are structured citations that create brand prominence for the plant-based diner we’ve been visiting today.
Why does this matter?
“Prominence” has come to be known as one of the three local search ranking pillars publicized by Google in documents like Tips to improve your local rankings on Google shown above. Did you notice the last sentence in this screenshot? Google specifically cites reviews and ratings as being part of their calculation of your brand’s prominence. Formal GBP reviews are obviously involved here, but in the emerging AI scenario, literally any sentiment the public is publishing about your business is going to become an evaluation and component of your brand’s overall authority. Look at Google’s AI Mode scraping Reddit for sentiment about this diner:
How to collaborate with your community on Authoritativeness
73% of Americans reportedly use social media, meaning that what used to be called “the power of the pen” is now in anyone’s hands who has a phone or laptop. Earn as many positive citations and reviews to build your prominence/authority with the following tips:
- Give them something to talk about; create an experience that is unique on the local scene so that your community voluntarily posts about it on their social media and review profiles.
- Use store signage, vehicle signage, print materials, and review requests to emphasize how much your business wants to be publicized and reviewed online by its customers.
- While you should never incentivize reviews (it can lead to public warning labels and lawsuits), disclosed paid social influencer content can help you create some powerful local citations that drive brand awareness and new business to your door.
- Be on the constant lookout for opportunities to become a guest on your customers’ online media channels. Appear on their blogs, vlogs, and podcasts.
- Some of your customers may write for local online news; become a source for them for local and business interest stories. Even if a customer is only an employee of a local media company instead of a content producer, their conversations with colleagues can drive coverage. Get to know your customers in the real world. Anyone remotely related to content production is always hungry for good story ideas.
- There’s still plenty of value in other sources of structured citations, such as sponsoring local teams and events, hosting happenings and causes, philanthropic giving, and B2B cross-promotion.
Trustworthiness
Trustworthiness basically comes down to whether a brand delivers on its promises, or if there are issues that are causing consumers concerns. The above Google AI Mode summary of negative feedback demonstrates how the web (including review and social platforms) are being scraped to generate answers. Here, we can see that our example diner may have some challenges to overcome, like:
- Promising fast food, but sometimes delivering slow service
- Tackling the idea that fast food should be inexpensive, yet some customers finding the prices of this restaurant to be high compared to competitors
- Earning bad press for labor disputes could be especially problematic for a brand that trades on something like a compassionate lifestyle (veganism)
In Google’s world, trust is often most closely associated with your-money-or-your-life (YMYL) searches, like queries for information about health or finances. But trust is definitely on the line when we look at a review like the above from a husband whose wife has celiac disease; the couple needs to trust that eating at this diner won’t cause illness.
Why does this matter?
I can’t write about the topic of trust without strongly advising you not to count on AI for YMYL information. I am already seeing a proliferation of articles about people talking to AI instead of doctors and psychotherapists, and frankly, that’s terrifying because AI is simply slicing and dicing whatever it finds on the internet, and outputting content that could be completely wrong. Whether or not people are aware of AI’s so-called “hallucinations”, the public is asking questions like the above, “can celiacs eat at Amy’s?” Maybe you can trust the sources Google’s AI Mode is linking to, or maybe they were written by AI and are automatically, therefore, unworthy of trust.
These are dark waters, but what you do need to know is that AI is going to tokenize anything it can scrape from online content about your business, including reviews. It is going to try to match tiny building blocks of words (tokens) to whatever prompts users input. With enough prompts, you can get AI to say almost anything. For example, here it is confusingly telling me that misconceptions about whether people with celiac disease in Europe are stemming from medical professionals. Are you sure about that, Google AI Mode? I’m not.
But back to the purpose of promoting your local business: what you need to know is that the bar has never been lower for highly-visible online environments promoting anything anyone says about your business.
How to collaborate with your community on Trustworthiness
Get the basics right about earning consumer trust to minimize both negative reviews and misleading or embarrassing AI content about your brand:
- Publicize and uphold your consumer guarantees. Where service failures occur, make things right for the customer. This includes responding to negative reviews quickly and professionally to resolve complaints and, hopefully, inspire customers to update their sentiment to reflect a better second experience with your brand.
- Maintain brand name, contact, and open hours information accuracy across the web. Update your local business listings, citations, social profiles, review profiles, media channels, and website any time core information changes. This will minimize consumer inconvenience and the negative reviews and social posts that result from it.
- Never violate the content guidelines or policies of any online platform.
- Be sure your website is offering a secure experience that delivers answers to consumers’ questions.
Next steps
Review content has been a pillar of local search marketing since the emergence of online local business reviews. While the SEO industry is currently in flux about how AI is reshaping consumer behavior and our work, I feel confident in predicting that reviews will continue to play a major role in local business discovery, engagement, conversions, and sales for the foreseeable future.
My advice is to involve your community as much as possible – the she ATE principal – so that everyone is winning. If you’re ready to make a professional investment in review acquisition and management, GatherUp can help. If you’d like some more statistics about the power of reviews to share with decision makers at your brand, read our survey of over 12,000 US consumers, Beyond the Stars: How American Consumers Use Reviews to Choose Local Businesses
