Picture an exchange comparison page that ranks well. It lists five platforms, links to each one with an affiliate link, and calls one of them the safest place to buy Bitcoin. The page doesn’t say that the site earns a commission when readers sign up, who looked at the platforms, or when the fees in the table were last checked. A reader who follows its advice has no way to judge whether they should.
That gap between what a crypto page claims and what it shows is what E-E-A-T for crypto websites comes down to. In this guide I’ll go through what Google’s documentation actually says about YMYL and E-E-A-T, where common SEO advice goes further than that documentation, and how to audit your highest-risk pages: who wrote and checked them, where their facts come from, and what readers need to know about how you make money.
Google doesn’t publish a list of YMYL topics for crypto. What its guidance on helpful content does say is that its systems give even more weight to content that aligns with strong E-E-A-T for topics that could significantly impact the health, financial stability, or safety of people, or the welfare or well-being of society. Google calls these “Your Money or Your Life” topics, or YMYL for short.
Everything beyond that is interpretation, so here is mine. Crypto pages that influence investment decisions, the security of someone’s assets, or other financial choices with real consequences are likely to fall into the group Google describes. Wallet setup and recovery guides, exchange comparisons, staking and yield pages, and anything about tax or regulation belong there. A page about the history of a project’s logo, or a glossary entry that explains what a block explorer is, carries far less risk, and there’s no reason to assume it gets the same scrutiny.
That distinction is useful for planning. You don’t have to treat every page on a crypto site as high stakes. The pages that can cost a reader money deserve the most care, and they are where the rest of this guide applies first.
E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. The first E is fairly recent. On December 15, 2022, Google announced that E-A-T was gaining an E for experience, described as content produced with some degree of experience, such as actual use of a product, having actually visited a place or communicating what a person experienced. Of the four aspects, Google says trust is most important. If you’d like the basics first, my beginner explainer on E-E-A-T in SEO covers where the idea came from.
Not as a single factor. Google’s own wording is that while E-E-A-T itself isn’t a specific ranking factor, using a mix of factors that can identify content with good E-E-A-T is useful. There is no E-E-A-T score you can raise. It describes what reliable content looks like, so improving it means improving the content and how openly you present it.
The search quality rater guidelines cause similar confusion. Google says these guidelines are used by its search raters to help evaluate the performance of its ranking systems, and they don’t directly influence ranking, and that search raters have no control over how pages rank. The guidelines are still worth reading, because they show what Google considers reliable content. They just aren’t a ranking checklist.
Google’s authorship advice is more nuanced than “every article needs a named author”. Its self-assessment questions ask whether it is self-evident who authored your content, whether pages carry a byline where one might be expected, and whether bylines lead to further information about the authors. Google also says it strongly encourages adding accurate authorship information, such as bylines to content where readers might expect it.
“Where readers might expect it” matters. A wallet security guide or an exchange review is exactly the kind of page where readers want to know who is talking. A short product update note may not need a personal byline at all.
Crypto has a long tradition of pseudonymous builders and writers, and a pseudonym is not a red flag in itself. What it makes harder is verification: a reader can’t check someone’s track record if nothing connects the name to their work. If your authors or team use pseudonyms, give readers other ways to check them. Use the same identity consistently, link to public work published under that name (code repositories, audit reports, research), and make a company or a named editor responsible for what the site publishes.
Nobody has to publish personal details that would put their privacy or safety at risk. Accountability can sit with the company and a documented editorial process. What you can’t do is invent people. Google is explicit that fabricating creator profiles, such as by using AI-generated headshots, made-up names, or false credentials, is a form of deception.
On high-risk crypto content, an author page is useful when it gives readers things they can check: what the person actually works on, which subjects they cover and which they leave to others, and relevant work that can be verified, such as published research, security reviews, open-source contributions or roles at named companies. Formal credentials belong there when they exist and are relevant. Inflated ones do more harm than none.
Help search engines connect the author to the page as well. Google’s Article structured data documentation recommends the Person type for people and the Organization type for organizations, and strongly recommends using the type and url (or sameAs) properties. In practice, mark the author as a Person (or the team as an Organization) and point the url or sameAs property to the author page or a public profile. When an article has more than one author, Google says to list each author in their own author field.
This is where many crypto sites can improve fastest. Google notes that it’s helpful to readers to know how a piece of content was produced, and for product reviews specifically that it can build trust with readers when they understand the number of products that were tested, what the test results were, and how the tests were conducted, all accompanied by evidence of the work involved, such as photographs. Its self-assessment questions also ask whether content is written or reviewed by an expert or enthusiast who demonstrably knows the topic well.
A short review record on every high-risk page covers most of this:
Two rules keep the record honest. Describe only testing that really happened, in the detail it happened. And only change the “last reviewed” date when someone actually reviewed the page.
Google suggests evaluating your content in terms of “Who, How, and Why”. Here’s what that looks like on one common crypto page. This is an illustration, not an audit of a real site.
| Weaker version | Stronger version | |
|---|---|---|
| Who | “By Admin”, no author page | A named author or verifiable pseudonym with an author page, plus a named reviewer for the fee and security claims |
| Claims | “The safest exchange”, “lowest fees” | Specific, attributed statements, for example what each exchange says about how it holds customer funds, linked to its own documentation, and what the author could not verify |
| Fees | Copied from each exchange’s homepage, undated | Taken from each exchange’s published fee schedule, linked, with the date they were checked |
| Testing | “We tested every platform”, with no detail | States what was done and when (accounts opened, deposits and withdrawals made), or says plainly that no hands-on testing was done |
| Money | Affiliate links with no explanation | A plain disclosure near the top: which links earn a commission and whether that affects the order of the list |
| Updates | No date | A last-reviewed date and a short change log |
Google’s guidance on writing high quality reviews supports most of the stronger column. It recommends that reviewers provide evidence such as visuals, audio, or other links of your own experience, share quantitative measurements about how something measures up in various categories of performance, and discuss the benefits and drawbacks of something, based on your own original research.
The “why” is the part people skip. Google puts it this way: the “why” should be that you’re creating content primarily to help people. A question your users ask often is a good reason to write a page, but it doesn’t make the page useful by itself. The page still has to answer that question better than the alternatives, with facts a reader can check.
Google’s self-assessment includes a blunt question: does the content have any easily-verified factual errors? On crypto pages, those errors are often outdated fees, networks a platform no longer supports, or security steps that changed with an app update. A simple method catches most of them:
Many crypto sites earn money from exchange and wallet referrals, paid listings or sponsored content. That’s a normal business model, but readers can only weigh your recommendations if they know about it.
Advertising disclosure rules also differ between countries, so check what applies in the markets you serve.
E-E-A-T describes what good content looks like. Google’s spam policies are explicit rules, and Google says it seeks to identify pages with scammy or fraudulent content using automated systems and prevent them from showing up in Google Search results. Five of them come up regularly on crypto sites, alongside the thin affiliation policy above.
Scam and fraud. According to Google, scam and fraud include impersonating an official business or service through imposter sites, intentionally displaying false information about a business or service, or otherwise attracting users to a site on false pretenses. Legitimate projects help their users by making the official domain and accounts easy to confirm, for example by listing them on the About page.
Misleading functionality. Google describes this as intentionally creating sites that trick users into thinking they would be able to access some content or services but in reality can’t. An “airdrop checker” or “wallet tool” that only collects email addresses fits that description.
Scaled content abuse. This is when many pages are generated for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings and not helping users. A templated page for every token with nothing but a price widget is the crypto version. Programmatic pages can be useful when each one carries real data or analysis.
Expired domain abuse. Google defines it as an expired domain name purchased and repurposed primarily to manipulate search rankings by hosting content that provides little to no value to users. Buying an old domain to give a new token site a head start is what this describes.
Site reputation abuse. Sponsored articles are common in crypto marketing, and Google says having third-party content alone isn’t inconsistent with the site reputation policy; it’s only inconsistent if the third-party content is published on a host site mainly because of that host site’s already-established ranking signals. A sponsored story written for a publication’s readers is different from a page placed there only to rank for “best crypto exchange”. My article with tips for crypto website SEO covers the wider basics beyond trust and policies.
Crypto information goes out of date quickly, and it’s easy to overstate what Google does about that. Google’s ranking systems guide says that in cases where reliable information might be lacking, its systems automatically display content advisories about rapidly-changing topics or when they don’t have high confidence in the overall quality of the results available for the search. Those advisories concern the results for a search. Google doesn’t say that an outdated page triggers an advisory or a penalty. It also describes query deserves freshness systems designed to show fresher content for queries where it would be expected, which is about searches where recent information is what people want.
So review your pages for the reader’s sake. Outdated fees or security steps can cost someone money, whatever they do to your rankings. How often to review depends on how fast the information changes and how much harm a mistake does. This is the schedule I’d start from:
| Information on the page | How it changes | If it’s wrong | Suggested review |
|---|---|---|---|
| Security and recovery steps (seed phrases, two-factor setup, app flows) | With app and firmware releases | Readers can lose access to their funds | After each product release, and at least every quarter |
| Fees, limits, supported assets and networks | Often, sometimes without notice | Readers pay more than expected or use an unsupported network | Monthly, and whenever the platform announces changes |
| Staking rewards, yields and lock-up terms | Frequently | Readers decide on figures that no longer apply | Whenever you show a figure; if you can’t keep it current, link to the official source instead |
| Licensing and regulatory status | Irregularly, per market | Readers rely on protections that may not apply | When regulators publish changes, and at least every quarter |
| Concept explainers and glossaries | Slowly | Usually low | Once or twice a year |
Low traffic alone is not a reason to delete a page. A page with few visits can still answer an important question well, and removing content doesn’t automatically improve rankings. Decide page by page:
Redirect only when a genuinely relevant replacement exists. In its site move documentation, Google advises: don’t redirect many old URLs to one irrelevant single URL destination, such as the home page of the new site. This can confuse users and might be treated as a soft 404 error. When there is no good replacement, letting the old URL return a “not found” status is the honest option.
For Google’s own AI features, the documentation is short and clear: there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary. To be shown as a supporting link, a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet, and both features may use a “query fan-out” technique, issuing multiple related searches across subtopics and data sources.
How often are the cited pages also top-ranking pages? Ahrefs has measured it twice. In a study published in July 2025, based on 1.9M citations from 1M AI Overviews, looking at the three most visible citations in each response, 76.10% of AI Overview-cited pages ranked in the top 10. In an update dated March 2, 2026, covering 863K keyword SERPs and 4M AI Overview URLs, 37.9% of URLs cited in AI Overviews also appeared within the first 10 blocks of the results page. Ahrefs attributed the change to AI Overviews relying less on the direct search results and more on the sources showing up in fan-out query results.
My reading of this: ranking well for a query overlaps with being cited, but it doesn’t guarantee a citation, and the overlap shifted as Google changed how AI Overviews find sources. These figures also describe Google AI Overviews only. They tell us nothing about how ChatGPT, Perplexity or other assistants choose their sources.
I’ve worked in SEO since 2012, and AI visibility is part of my work now too. The approach I’d defend is the same as the rest of this guide: accurate, well-sourced pages that answer the question clearly, on a site that is open about who runs it and how it makes money. No E-E-A-T checklist guarantees a place in an AI answer, and I’d be wary of anyone who promises one.
You don’t need to fix the whole site at once. Start with five pages and work through them in this order:
Then move on to the next five. An SEO audit covers these trust questions alongside the technical ones, and my page on SEO for crypto and Web3 companies explains how I approach these projects.
Want help auditing the highest-risk pages on your crypto site? Get in touch with me.
A note on how I write: I use AI tools as part of my writing process, for example to help with research, drafting, and a final check of spelling, grammar and punctuation. English isn’t my first language (I’m from the Netherlands). I use it every day, at work and at home with my American husband, but I like a second pair of eyes on my writing. I review every article myself before it’s published, and every statistic links to its source.
