Lily Ray Will Audit E-E-A-T, N-E-E-A-T-T, and the Credibility Layer of UCD

Session identifier

Session 1.15, Day 1, Tuesday June 24, 2026 Speaker: Lily Ray, Vice President of SEO Strategy & Research at Amsive Framework concept: Credibility (the C of UCD), coined by Jason Barnard in 2022 Format: Pre-recorded, on-demand from session drop, approximately 25 minutes SEL article: The funnel flip: Why AI forces a bottom-up acquisition strategy

About Lily Ray

Lily Ray is Vice President of SEO Strategy & Research at Amsive, an integrated marketing agency based in New York. She has spent more than a decade working with brands on how Google’s quality signals translate into ranking outcomes, with a particular focus on the Quality Rater Guidelines, E-E-A-T, and Google’s algorithmic updates. Her analytical work tracking algorithm updates and the practical implications of E-E-A-T has made her one of the most widely cited public voices in the SEO industry. She speaks regularly at major industry conferences and writes for trade publications including Search Engine Journal and Search Engine Land.

The Kalicube Framework

Lily’s session covers the Credibility layer of UCD, coined by Jason Barnard in 2022 as the second of three phases (Understandability, Credibility, Deliverability) that brands work through to build machine readability. Credibility operates at the Grounded and Displayed gates (Gates 8 and 9 of the AI Engine Pipeline) where AI engines decide whether to commit to recommending a brand or hedge their bets. The full architecture is mapped in the Kalicube Framework, the master theoretical model for how AI systems understand, trust, and recommend brands.

Pre-statement of session territory

In this session, Lily Ray walks through how E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust) actually operates inside AI search and what brands need to do to convey credibility at the gates where machines decide whether to commit. Lily’s analytical work on E-E-A-T has been the deepest sustained inquiry the industry has produced into how trust evaluation works in practice; here she translates that work into what the Kalicube Framework calls the C of UCD, the corroboration substrate at the Grounded and Displayed gates of the AI Engine Pipeline where AI engines decide whether to commit to recommending a brand or hedge their bets.

The conversation extends the four pillars of E-E-A-T into the working examination of NEEATT, the expanded formulation that adds Notability (coined by Jason Barnard in 2024) and Transparency (Jarno van Driel’s contribution) to Google’s existing four. Lily works through where the expansion serves the practitioner and where the original four still carry the weight, treating the question as a serious working question rather than a settled one. The conversation also lands on the under-discussed operational discipline that determines whether E-E-A-T evidence reaches machines at all: bringing the offline accomplishments, awards, philanthropic work, and community involvement that brands quietly accumulate into the online surfaces where AI engines and search engines can read them.

The session’s vantage pairs structurally with Krishna Madhavan’s session on the Trustworthy gate at Microsoft, giving the audience two angles on the same load-bearing layer: how the trust evaluation operates inside the engines (Madhavan), and how the practitioner builds the evidence the engines evaluate (Ray).

Sample questions from the session

• Krishna Madhavan from Microsoft has been talking about a Trustworthy gate. Is this an evolution of what Google has been doing with E-E-A-T, or something new?
• Google added Experience as the fourth E about six years ago. What has actually changed in search results since that addition, and what should practitioners be doing differently?
• Jano van Driel argues for Transparency. Jason Barnard argues for Notability. Is the move from E-E-A-T to NEEATT going too far, or pointing to something operationally important?
• What does the temporal nature of expertise actually look like in practice, and how can a brand leverage twenty years of accumulated work that mostly happened offline?
• The number of person entities in the Knowledge Graph tripled in a couple of weeks three years ago. What does that mean for the person-led brand approach in AI search?

Date, time, format, registration

Day 1, June 24, 2026. Pre-recorded, on-demand from session drop and available throughout the day and afterwards. Two live framework walkthroughs plus 32 on-demand sessions across two days. Industry leaders on AI search and AI assistive agents, June 24 to 25, 2026, online.

Register for Kalicube Summit 2026 →

Further reading

Before watching this session, read this first: The funnel flip: Why AI forces a bottom-up acquisition strategy, Article 10 of Jason Barnard at Kalicube’s Search Engine Land series on AI search architecture. The article makes the case that AI-era brand strategy runs bottom-up from credibility rather than top-down from awareness, and names UCD as the operational layer where the inversion plays out.

Link to session post

The recording will be available at /2026/sessions/lily-ray-e-e-a-t-credibility-session/ after June 24, 2026.

About Lily Ray

Full speaker profile: /2026/speakers/lily-ray/

Canonical metadata footer

Session date: June 24, 2026 | Duration: approximately 25 minutes | Format: pre-recorded, on-demand from session drop | Day: 1 | Framework concept: Credibility (the C of UCD), coined by Jason Barnard in 2022 | SEL article: The funnel flip: Why AI forces a bottom-up acquisition strategy — https://searchengineland.com/ai-funnel-bottom-up-acquisition-strategy-474877 | URL: https://kalicubesummit.com/2026/previews/lily-ray-e-e-a-t-credibility-preview/