A physiotherapist I work with sent me a screenshot in May with a message that said: “Why is she showing up and I’m not?”
She’d been treating sports injuries in her suburb for sixteen years. Her clinic has a waiting list. Her reviews are consistently glowing and specific. When she searched for physiotherapists in her area using one of the AI tools, a competitor with about three years of practice was being recommended by name. She wasn’t mentioned at all.
When I looked at both profiles, the difference wasn’t experience. It was evidence. The competitor had a detailed About page with her name, her qualifications, her clinical focus areas, and a clear statement of her approach. She had named blog posts answering questions patients actually search for. Her content was written by someone who clearly knew the field.
My client’s website, despite sixteen years of genuine expertise behind it, was presenting itself as a faceless clinic.
This is the EEAT gap in practice, and it’s exactly what AI search has made more consequential.
EEAT stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness, and it’s the framework Google uses to work out whether the people behind a business genuinely know their stuff and can be trusted. It isn’t a single setting you switch on. It’s the accumulated evidence, on your website, in your reviews, in your directory listings, and wherever your business name appears online, that proves you are the genuine expert in what you do.
For a local service business, this has always mattered. When someone is choosing a vet, an electrician or a physio, trust is the whole game. Google is simply trying to measure online the same things your customers judge in person. Are you experienced? Do you clearly know what you’re talking about? Do other people vouch for you?
The shift now is that AI search is asking the exact same question, just louder and with higher stakes.
When AI tools like Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity construct an answer or a recommendation, they don’t hand you ten links and let you sort it out. They read the web, assess who sounds credible, and put one or two names forward. Someone gets cited. Someone gets left out.
To decide who to trust, these tools lean heavily on signals of genuine expertise. Clear, specific content written by a named person who obviously knows the field. Consistent information about your business across the web. Real reviews from real customers that contain actual detail. In other words, the same things EEAT has always rewarded, now doing even more of the heavy lifting.
That’s why I tell clients not to panic about AI search and start chasing AI-specific tricks. The businesses getting recommended by AI tools are not the ones who optimised for AI. They’re the ones who built genuine expertise signals first, and those signals are now doing double duty.
You don’t need a marketing degree for any of this. You need to take what’s already in your head and in your day-to-day work and make it visible.
1. Put a real person on your About page. Your name, your face, your years in the trade, your qualifications, and a sentence on why you started. “We are a passionate team committed to excellence” tells Google and a potential customer nothing. “I’m Karen, I’ve been running local SEO campaigns for service businesses since 2014” tells them quite a lot.
2. Name the author on your blog posts. Content that’s clearly written by a named expert carries far more weight than anonymous filler. Even a short author bio at the bottom, a line or two on your experience and qualifications, turns generic content into EEAT evidence.
3. Get reviews, and actually reply to them. Genuine reviews from real customers are one of the strongest trust signals you have, both for customers and for AI tools reading your profile. Ask happy clients, make it easy for them, and reply to every review like a human being wrote the response.
4. Show the detail only an expert would know. Write the way you’d explain something at the kitchen table. The specific thing that catches people out, the question you always get asked, the reason the cheap option gets it wrong. That depth is hard to fake, and it’s exactly what credible content looks like to both Google and AI tools.
5. Keep your business details consistent everywhere. Your name, address and phone number should match exactly across your website, Google Business Profile, and every directory. Mismatched details quietly chip away at trust signals, and consistent details reinforce them.
The most common one is hiding behind the brand. So many service businesses write about themselves as though a faceless company is talking, when the whole reason customers choose them is the actual human doing the work. EEAT for local service businesses is built on people, not logos.
The second mistake is treating expertise as something you claim rather than something you demonstrate. Saying you’re the expert does nothing. Showing your work, your reviews, your named team, and your genuinely useful answers does everything.
After we worked through her website together, she rewrote her About page, named herself as the author on her existing blog posts, added a short bio to each one, and wrote three new posts answering the questions she gets asked most often at initial consults. Four months later she appears by name in AI responses for her suburb. The expertise was always there. Now Google and the AI tools can finally see it.
For the practical checklist of trust signals to add to your website, see The EEAT Trust Signals Google Actually Checks. And if you’d like a second pair of eyes on whether your site is set up to be found in AI search, that’s exactly what we do at Blue Cherry. Get in touch and I’ll take a look.
Karen Dauncey has been working in SEO since 2003 and is a recognised expert in Local SEO for professional and service-based businesses across Australia.
She is the founder of Blue Cherry Online Marketing, a Local SEO and Google Ads agency she established in 2008. Through Blue Cherry, Karen has optimised over 1,000 websites and managed millions of dollars in Google Ads spend, giving her a deep understanding of what drives visibility and enquiries for service businesses in a constantly evolving search landscape. Over the past two decades, she has worked with a wide range of local service businesses including trades, allied health, psychologists, childcare centres, naturopaths, accountants, lawyers and many more.
Karen is also the creator of The SEO School, an online SEO course designed to teach business owners how to take control of their own SEO. She regularly delivers educational programs for Local, State and Federal Government and was an advisor for the ASBAS Digital Solutions Program. Her passion for making SEO accessible drives everything she does, from free resources to hands-on training.
Karen has attended search engine conferences in London, Stockholm, Adelaide and Sydney, and was invited to attend a pilot Business Coaching Course at Google's Head Office. She holds a Diploma in Marketing from the Chartered Institute of Marketing in the UK.
She is also the co-owner of the Digital Experts Directory, an online directory for female service-based businesses.
To keep up to date with the latest in SEO, join her Facebook group The SEO School Community or follow her on Facebook or LinkedIn.
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