E-E-A-T audit rules: authors, trust and YMYL signals
Audit rules for on-page trust signals: author bylines and bios, about and contact pages, citations, dates, YMYL disclaimers and affiliate disclosures.
E-E-A-T rules look for the evidence a reader uses to decide whether to believe a site: who runs it, who wrote the page, what the claims rest on, and how to reach a human. Most of them check for a page or a piece of structured data rather than judging its quality, so a pass means the signal exists and not that it is convincing. Several are gated on the audit’s own site classification, since author credentials matter on a medical site and mean nothing on a landing page.
Run only these rules
squirrel audit https://example.com --rule-include eeatAuthority signals is a cloud rule and runs only when you are signed in.
Where to start
These carry the highest severity and weight in the category.
- About page: what it establishes and how squirrel finds it: An About page is where a reader decides whether you are a real organisation. squirrel finds it by URL or schema and checks it has content.
- Author bylines on content pages: what share carry one: Content published by nobody in particular is harder to trust. squirrel measures what share of your content pages attribute an author.
- Contact page: finding it and counting the contact methods: A site with no reachable human is a site a reader has no reason to trust. squirrel finds the contact page and counts its email and phone links.
- Privacy policy: the page and how widely it is linked: A privacy policy nobody can find does not do its job. squirrel finds the page and measures what share of your pages link to it.
- datePublished and dateModified across content pages: Undated content leaves a reader guessing whether it is current. squirrel measures how much of your content carries each date.
Rules
| Rule | What it flags | Severity | Scope |
|---|---|---|---|
| About page: what it establishes and how squirrel finds it | An About page is where a reader decides whether you are a real organisation. squirrel finds it by URL or schema and checks it has content. | warning | Site-wide |
| Affiliate disclosure: detecting affiliate links without one | Undisclosed affiliate links are a regulatory problem and a trust problem. squirrel detects affiliate link patterns and looks for a disclosure page. | info | Site-wide |
| Author bylines on content pages: what share carry one | Content published by nobody in particular is harder to trust. squirrel measures what share of your content pages attribute an author. | warning | Site-wide |
| Author expertise: bio pages and Person schema | A name is attribution; a bio is expertise. squirrel looks for author pages and Person structured data across the crawl. | info | Site-wide |
| Authoritative citations: sources a reader can check | A factual claim with a source a reader can follow is stronger than one without. squirrel counts outbound links to a list of authoritative domains. | info | Site-wide |
| Authority signals: an AI read of authorship and citations | Pattern matching sees markup; this rule reads the page. The cloud service reports whether it is attributed and what its claims rest on. | warning | Per-page |
| Contact page: finding it and counting the contact methods | A site with no reachable human is a site a reader has no reason to trust. squirrel finds the contact page and counts its email and phone links. | warning | Site-wide |
| datePublished and dateModified across content pages | Undated content leaves a reader guessing whether it is current. squirrel measures how much of your content carries each date. | warning | Site-wide |
| Disclaimers on YMYL content: what to say and where | Health, finance and legal content needs to say what it is not. squirrel looks for a dedicated disclaimer page by its URL. | info | Site-wide |
| Editorial policy: publishing how the content gets made | A stated editorial process is a claim a reader can hold you to. squirrel looks for policy pages by their multilingual URL patterns. | info | Site-wide |
| Physical address: PostalAddress and LocalBusiness schema | A real address is a trust signal a visitor can verify. squirrel looks for address structured data across the crawl. | info | Site-wide |
| Privacy policy: the page and how widely it is linked | A privacy policy nobody can find does not do its job. squirrel finds the page and measures what share of your pages link to it. | warning | Site-wide |
| Terms of service page: when a site needs one | Terms of service set the rules for using a site or a service. squirrel looks for the page by its multilingual URL patterns. | info | Site-wide |
| Trust signals: reviews, testimonials and social proof | Reviews and testimonials are what a hesitant visitor looks for. squirrel checks for review schema and testimonial pages across the crawl. | info | Site-wide |
| YMYL content: what it is and how squirrel detects it | Health, finance and legal content is held to a higher standard. squirrel classifies the crawl by keyword and reports which categories it found. | info | Site-wide |
Key terms
- Affiliate disclosure: A clear statement that a page earns commission from links, required by the FTC in the US and similar rules elsewhere.
- Author byline: The visible author name on an article, ideally linked to an author page and matched by an author entity in structured data.
- Content freshness: How current a page is and how consistently it says so: visible dates, dateModified, sitemap lastmod and copyright year.
- E-E-A-T: Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness: the qualities Google’s quality raters are told to assess, with trust at the centre.
- NAP consistency: Name, address and phone number stated the same way across a site’s pages, schema and listings.
- Privacy policy: The page explaining what personal data a site collects and why; required by law in many places and a trust signal for search.
- YMYL: Topics that could significantly affect a person’s health, finances, safety or society, which Google’s raters hold to a higher standard.
Related categories
Content checks the text itself: length, dates that disagree and placeholder copy. Structured data checks the Article, Organization and author markup, and Crawlability decides whether the pages carrying these signals can be indexed at all.
Learn more
- Fix SEO issues with AI, the coding agent workflow for working through a report
- Website audit tool
- Sample report, with the E-E-A-T section on a real site
Disable all E-E-A-T rules
[rules]
disable = ["eeat/*"]