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Ask your AI this question right now:
“Score my EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trust) from 1–10 using only public info. Then, compare that score to what I’ve actually done. Explain the difference between my real experience and what the internet can prove.”
The answer is probably more important than your latest content strategy.
I did this check on myself this week, and the result was tough. The AI could see I had experience: leadership jobs, time in aviation, years running tech and systems. But it could only see part of the real story. The deep stuff — the outages I fixed, the cultures I changed, the people I helped, the hard-earned lessons — was mostly missing from my online content.
That gap matters now. Why? Because Google’s May Core Update now rewards you for proving your experience, not just hinting at it.
For years, the internet rewarded people who were good at selling their expertise. Today, the platforms want you to prove you earned it. Google calls this EEAT: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. EEAT isn’t new, but it is fundamentally more important now. The biggest change is the first letter: Experience.
Google is asking more than “Can you explain the topic?” It’s asking, “Have you actually lived it?”
This changes everything about content.
The smart move now is to make sure your real experience is online. Search engines and AI can only judge the proof you leave: the stories you tell, the specific details you share, the lessons you learned firsthand, and the “battle scars” visible in your content.
Simply put: your expertise is no longer just a line on your resume. It is now how people find you.
Google’s May 2026 Core Update began rolling out on May 21 and buried in the technical announcements is something worth pausing on. The dominant signal cluster is called EEAT: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness. The first letter is the one the search community is talking about. Experience. Google is now measuring, at scale, whether the person who wrote something has actually done it. Not whether they write well about it. Not whether their site has aged well. Whether the content reflects real first-hand knowledge of the subject.
For SEOs and marketers who built careers hands-on in the trenches, that is a different kind of news than another technical SEO update.
This Week’s Finds
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Story 1
Google's May 2026 Core Update rewards demonstrated experience over research-only content
Search Engine Land ↗
Coalition Technologies ↗
Google’s May 2026 Core Update started rolling out on May 21 and may take two weeks to complete fully. The update does not penalize AI-generated content as a category. What it penalizes is thin content that fails to demonstrate genuine expertise, regardless of how it was produced. The hardest-hit content categories are aggregator pages, thin comparison articles, generic affiliate content and pages that repackage existing information without adding original analysis. Sites with topical authority rooted in first-hand experience are gaining visibility in the early data. Google’s public guidance was consistent with past core updates: no specific technical fix reverses the impact. The system evaluates sustained quality over time. For SEOs and marketers, that means the question is not what to change on a page this week but whether your content actually reflects the knowledge you have from doing the work.
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Story 2
Instagram now weights DM shares 3–5× more than likes for Reels distribution
Sprout Social ↗
Buffer ↗
Instagram changed the most important distribution signal for Reels and you might still be optimizing for the old one. The platform now weights DM shares three to five times more heavily than likes when deciding how broadly to push a Reel to non-followers. Adam Mosseri confirmed this directly: when someone sends a Reel to a friend via direct message, that tells Instagram the content was worth passing on. One hundred likes carries less weight for unconnected reach than ten DM shares. The practical implication is a different content question. Are you making content people want to share privately with someone they care about, or content people want to be seen liking publicly? Those are different problems and right now Instagram is rewarding the first one.
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Story 3
GEO research shows expert quotes boost AI citation frequency by ~41%, statistics by ~30%
Jasper Blog ↗
Digiday ↗
GEO, or Generative Engine Optimization, is the practice of structuring content so that AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity cite it in their generated responses. It is being discussed as a new discipline separate from traditional SEO, but the core requirement is the same one Google just reaffirmed in its core update: demonstrate genuine expertise. According to research published by Jasper, adding expert quotes to content boosts AI citation frequency by roughly 41%, adding specific statistics by about 30% and adding citations to external sources by around 30%. Context for why this matters: about 31% of US internet users now search through generative AI and AI Overviews have reduced click-through rates for traditional organic results by 58%. GEO is not a replacement for SEO. It is SEO adapted to an environment where the gatekeeper has changed from a blue link to an AI answer.
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Story 4
LinkedIn personal profiles earn 2.75× more impressions and 5× more engagement than company pages
TACTUS ↗
Millennial Magazine ↗
LinkedIn personal profiles generate 2.75 times more impressions and five times more engagement than company pages. Executive content costs 73% less per qualified engagement than company-sponsored content and converts at four times the rate. Among B2B buyers, 95% say thought leadership content directly influences their purchasing decisions. Those numbers appear consistently across multiple 2026 studies and they point at the same thing the rest of this week’s stories point at: people trust people. Not logos. Not brand accounts. The founder who writes about something they have done and learned outperforms the company account publishing the same information with better production value.
2.75×
LinkedIn personal profiles generate 2.75 times more impressions and 5 times more engagement than company pages. Executive content costs 73% less per qualified engagement and converts at 4× the rate.
Four different stories this week and they converge on the same thing. Google, Instagram, AI search tools and LinkedIn are all getting better at measuring whether the person talking has actually done the thing they are talking about.
That is not a coincidence. It is a response to five years of content inflation where anyone could produce anything about any subject at industrial scale. The platforms ran on engagement signals that were easy to game. Now they are trying to build signals that are harder to fake: first-hand experience in content, private shares that indicate genuine value, specific expertise that earns AI citations, the credibility that makes a personal profile outperform a brand account.
For SEOs and marketers, this is good positioning news. IMG’s audience has professional backgrounds. They have client results. They have worked through real problems with real people and arrived at specific conclusions that generic content cannot replicate. That material is exactly what every platform in this issue is trying to surface. The question is whether it is actually in the content.
Write from specific experience, not general advice
“Here is how I helped a client in this situation, with this result” outperforms “here are five tips for handling this.” Google rewards it under EEAT. LinkedIn amplifies it because personal profiles outperform brand accounts. AI tools cite it because it contains expert quotes and specific data. The specificity is the signal and the only source of genuine specificity is experience.
Change your Instagram content question
Instead of asking “what should I post this week?”, ask “what would someone forward to a friend?” Instagram is now weighting private signals like DM shares significantly more than public likes to decide which Reels reach non-followers. Content that earns those shares tends to be specific, surprising, or reflects a “battle scar” from a real process. Generic graphics and broad inspiration usually generate weaker sharing signals than specific stories or client results — the kind of lived experience that makes someone think of a specific person and hit send.
Layer your experience over AI drafts
If you use AI tools in your content workflow, treat the output as a first draft that needs your experience layered in. Your client stories, your specific data, your professional background. Without that layer, the output is competent prose that repackages what is already available, which is exactly the category Google’s May update is deprioritizing.
Post from your personal profile, not your company page
On LinkedIn, the data makes a clear argument for posting from your personal profile rather than a company page. If you are currently splitting your time between the two, the numbers suggest concentrating on personal. Write about specific things you have learned or done rather than about your services.
None of these changes require a large production investment. They require writing from where you actually are, which is something most SEOs and marketers have been trained by marketing culture to undervalue.
IMG’s Take
The platforms are not becoming harder to use. They are becoming harder to fake.
That is a meaningful distinction for IMG’s audience. There is a difference between a market that rewards scale and polish, which favors well-resourced content operations and a market that rewards demonstrated experience, which favors people who have actually done the work.
IMG’s position is direct: SEOs and marketers who have spent years doing real work before teaching it are sitting on a structural content advantage that is growing more valuable as AI-generated content volume increases. The reason is not philosophical. It is that AI cannot generate what you have actually seen, done and learned from a specific client in a specific situation.
The strategic error to avoid right now is treating your experience as background context rather than foreground material. The content that is winning across Google, Instagram, AI citations and LinkedIn is the content that puts lived experience at the center, not in the bio footer. The people who make that shift now are not catching a trend. They are building an asset that compounds.
Is your real experience visible in your content, or is it buried in your bio? Bring your numbers and content examples to the vault forum — the platforms are rewarding proof right now and the data from real practitioners is what moves everyone forward.
Join the IMG Community →
— Tim Nichols & The IMG Team
Sources cited in this edition
- Search Engine Land, Google May 2026 Core Update rolling out now (update details, rollout timeline, EEAT emphasis): Search Engine Land
- Coalition Technologies, May 2026 Google Core Algorithm Update (analysis of hardest-hit content categories): Coalition Technologies
- Sprout Social, Instagram Algorithm 2026 (DM shares weighting change, Mosseri confirmation): Sprout Social
- Buffer, Instagram Algorithms Explained 2026 (Reels distribution mechanics): Buffer
- Jasper Blog, GEO and AEO explained (expert quotes +41% AI citation, statistics +30%, citations +30%): Jasper Blog
- Digiday, WTF are GEO and AEO and how they differ from SEO (31% US users search via AI, 58% CTR reduction): Digiday
- TACTUS, LinkedIn Personal Brand 2026 (2.75× impressions, 5× engagement, 73% cost reduction, 4× conversion): TACTUS
- Millennial Magazine, Personal Branding and Thought Leadership Playbook (95% B2B buyer influence): Millennial Magazine
