Google stopped rewarding keywords alone. Here Is What It Cares About Now. Something quietly shifted in the world of search, and a lot of people did not notice until their traffic dropped. Google stopped rewarding content that was simply optimized. It started rewarding content that was genuinely worth reading. That is a bigger difference than it sounds. At the center of that shift is a framework called EEAT in SEO Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.