First-Hand Experience signal
21% of your content scoreWhy AI surfaces the source, not the summary
A machine can generate a summary of what's already published. It cannot generate what your own work taught you. That asymmetry is the whole argument for putting your experience on the page, and it doesn't depend on knowing how any engine ranks anything.
First-Hand Experience
Reading your site…
- A specific example from your own work, in the page's own copy
- Your own numbers in the body text, not "studies show"
- A first-person account of how and why you do the work
- Stated experience in the copy: years in practice, or how many clients you've done this for
Why it matters
What an engine does with it
Engines learn which sites speak from real experience and which ones rehash. What makes you the source instead of a copy is on the page itself: an example from a job you did, a number from your own work, what years of doing it taught you, said in your own voice. You don't need a formal study. You need to put what you already know into the pages people read. This signal is judged page by page; whether your business has a named method or a result with a number anywhere at all is a question about who you are, and it is scored under Who's Behind It instead.
What you'll see
First-Hand Experience, in the Tracker
How it's scored
A 0 to 10, in three bands
Every site gets a 0 to 10 on this signal, and it makes up 21% of the content score you watch. Here's what each band looks like.
Weak
0–4Almost entirely synthesis of common knowledge, with numbers cited without saying where they came from.
Mixed
5–6Some first-hand voice or one concrete example, but most content is general synthesis. Original and generic are mixed.
Strong
7–10Your own voice and knowledge are clearly present on most pages. 7 to 8 is the achievable target for a real practitioner; 9 to 10 means every page carries something only you could have written.
How to improve it
The changes that move it
In the Tracker
Every page the Tracker drafts leaves marked blanks for exactly this: a job you did, a price you charged, what you've seen go wrong. They're the parts a machine can't write, and a page can't go live through the one-click publish until you've filled them.
- 1Add one real example from your own work to each page that matters
- 2Replace a borrowed statistic with a number from your own practice
- 3Write in first person about how and why you do the work
- 4Say how long you've done it, or how many people you've done it for, in the copy
If you're a local business
For a local business, first-hand experience means proof that this business does this work in this place. It's the one thing a competitor's AI-written page can't fake.
- Real examples or anonymized cases with concrete details
- The towns or neighborhoods you actually work in, and for how long
- The owner's or practitioner's own voice on how the work gets done
- For health practices: credentials and "what to expect" specifics, never patient outcomes
Questions
Questions, answered
Do I need to run original research to score well?
No, and the Tracker will never tell you to. Lived expertise counts as fully as researched expertise. The achievable step is always to put more of what you already know into the page.
I've never run a survey. Can I still score well here?
Yes. A practitioner writing "in my 30 years doing this, the thing that always breaks is X" is a primary source. That sentence exists nowhere else, which is exactly what makes it citable.
Where do a named method and a client result count?
Under Who's Behind It. They're facts about your business as a whole, true or false for the entire site, so they're checked once there rather than on every page here.
The other five signals
See where you stand on all six.
One scan scores your site on every signal, shows the pages an engine reads and skips, and hands you the fix worth making first.
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