Lily Ray

When a Google core update lands, most of the industry produces anecdotes. Lily Ray produces comparative data across large sets of domains — which is why her analysis gets republished everywhere within a couple of days. She is Senior Vice President of SEO Strategy at Amsive.

Making E-E-A-T measurable

Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust is a framework from Google's Quality Rater Guidelines, not a ranking factor you can inspect. That ambiguity produced years of hand-waving. Ray's contribution has been to look for observable correlates — author attribution patterns, entity presence, citation behaviour, site-level publishing history — and test whether they move with update cycles.

YMYL and enterprise work

Her client work concentrates on Your-Money-Your-Life categories, where Google applies the most scrutiny and where the cost of a bad core update is highest. She contributes regularly to Search Engine Land and speaks at SMX, BrightonSEO and comparable conferences.