First-hand experience moves rankings indirectly, by producing the content that ranks, while also building trust, so the either/or in the question is a false split. Experience is not a directly measured ranking factor that Google reads off the page. What it does is generate the originality, specificity, and information gain that quality systems reward, and it supplies the Experience leg of EEAT that signals credibility. The ranking benefit is real, but it arrives through the better content the experience creates, not through experience being scored on its own.
The mechanism is straightforward once you separate the cause from what gets measured. When you have actually used the product, walked the trail, or run the process, you can write things a summarizer cannot: the detail that only shows up in practice, the caveat the manuals omit, the comparison drawn from real outcomes. That is information gain, the page adds something not already saturating the SERP, and it is originality and specificity, the page reads as genuinely sourced rather than rephrased. Those are the qualities the systems are built to reward, and experience is one of the most reliable ways to produce them.
This is why tokenism fails. Sprinkling “in my experience” across a page that contains no actual experience adds the phrase without adding any of the substance the phrase is supposed to signal. The words are not the lever; the originality and specificity they should accompany are. A page stuffed with experience-flavored phrasing but no real first-hand detail gains nothing, because there is no information gain underneath it. The trust value and the ranking value both come from the same place, the genuine experience, expressed as concrete content.
So include real first-hand experience for the distinctive, specific content it lets you write, not as a phrase to insert. Capture the details, comparisons, and caveats that only come from having done the thing, since that is what creates the originality and information gain rankings actually reward, and the trust follows from the same substance. Write from experience, do not just claim it.