About page: what it establishes and how squirrel finds it

What an About page is for

An About page answers who is behind this site. For a reader deciding whether to trust what they are reading, it is often the second page they open, and for Google’s helpful-content guidance it is where the who and the why of a site are supposed to be answerable.

A page that exists and says three sentences does not do that job. What makes it work is specifics: who runs the organisation, what they have done, how long they have been doing it, and how to reach them.

What squirrel checks

The rule is site-wide. It looks for an About page in two ways: a URL path matching one of the multilingual about patterns, or a page whose structured data declares the AboutPage type. The first match wins. It emits a single check named about-page:

• Skipped when no pages were crawled. Message: No pages available for analysis.
• Pass when the page is found and has 200 words or more. Message: About page exists with substantial content, with the URL as the value. Severity warning, weight 5.
• Info when it is found with fewer than 200 words. Message: About page exists but has limited content, with N words - consider expanding as the value.
• Info when no crawled page is the About page but a crawled page links to one the crawl did not fetch. Message: About page linked but not crawled, with the link target as the value and the linking page in the details.
• Warn instead when the internal link probe requested that uncrawled target and got a 4xx or 5xx. Message: About page link returns N, where N is the status. A 401, a 403 or a rate limit is not read as broken and stays info.
• Warn when there is neither a crawled About page nor a link to one. Message: No About page found, with Create /about or /about-us page as the value.

The schema fallback exists so a localised path the URL patterns do not recognise is still found.

A crawl that excludes the About page’s path, or reaches its page limit first, never fetches it. A link to the same host whose href matches one of the about patterns is evidence the page exists, not proof that it works, so the rule says it is linked but not crawled instead of advising you to create one. Anchor text alone does not count. No extra requests are made: the only status the rule can report is one the internal link probe already recorded, and the probe never requests a path the crawl scope or robots.txt excludes. To have the page checked, let the crawl fetch it. eeat/privacy-policy and eeat/contact-page treat their pages the same way.

How to fix it

Write the page for someone who has never heard of you: who runs this, what you do, what you have done before, where you are. Link it from the main navigation or the footer so it is reachable from every page.

The word threshold is a proxy for that. Padding the page to 200 words does not make it convincing.

Enable / disable

Disable this rule

[rules]
disable = ["eeat/about-page"]

Disable all E-E-A-T rules

[rules]
disable = ["eeat/*"]

Enable only this rule

[rules]
enable = ["eeat/about-page"]

enable replaces the default ["*"], so this is the only rule selected. Leave disable out: a rule that matches any disable pattern is skipped even when enable names it. Only an enabled setting under a rule’s own [rule_options] table overrides both lists.

Related rules

• eeat/contact-page: the other page a reader opens to check you are real.
• eeat/physical-address: the address that usually lives on both.
• eeat/author-expertise: who wrote the content, as opposed to who runs the site.
• eeat/trust-signals: the reviews and certifications a reader looks for next.

E-E-A-T findings ship in every audit next to the SEO, performance and agent experience rules. See Fix SEO issues with AI for how an agent works through a report.

References

• Creating helpful, reliable content, Google Search Central
• AboutPage, Schema.org

Check your site

Run squirrel audit https://example.com and open the E-E-A-T section of the report. The About page is reported with its URL when it passes, or its word count when the content is thin. Signed-out local audits need no account and cost nothing. Signed-in audits spend credits.