Author bylines on content pages: what share carry one

What an author byline is

A byline names who wrote a page. It can be structured data, a rel="author" link, or visible markup in the page’s entry header, and it is the first half of the experience and expertise part of E-E-A-T.

It matters most where the reader is being asked to act on what they read. Google’s guidance asks whether content presents information in a way that makes you want to trust it, and an unattributed article on a topic where expertise matters answers that badly.

What squirrel checks

The rule is site-wide. It counts content pages and how many of them attribute an author. A page counts as content when its path matches /blog, /article, /post, /news, /guide, /how-to or /review, when its schema declares Article, BlogPosting or NewsArticle, or when the parser found visible byline markup. On a crawl of five pages or fewer, every page is counted as content.

An author is found from the parser’s extracted author, from any flattened JSON-LD node carrying an author property, or from visible byline markup such as an hCard or a rel="author" link. It emits a single check named author-byline:

• Skipped when no pages were crawled. Message: No pages available for analysis.
• Info when no content pages were detected. Message: No content pages detected for author analysis.
• Pass when the coverage percentage, rounded to a whole number, is 80 or above. Message: 92% of content pages have author attribution, with 46/50 pages as the value. Severity warning, weight 5.
• Info from 50. Message: 64% of content pages have author attribution, with Consider adding authors to more content as the value.
• Warn below 50. Message: Only 20% of content pages have author attribution, or No content pages have author attribution when none do.

The rule only runs when the audit classified the site as a blog, a news site, a healthcare provider, an education site or a nonprofit. A classification below medium confidence, or an audit with no site metadata at all, runs the rule anyway.

How to fix it

<a rel="author" href="/authors/jane-diaz">Jane Diaz</a>

Show the name where the reader sees it, link it to a bio, and mirror it in the page’s Article schema as a Person. Put it in the article template so it applies to everything published through it.

An organisation byline is legitimate for institutional content. A named person with a bio is stronger where the claim rests on individual expertise.

Enable / disable

Disable this rule

[rules]
disable = ["eeat/author-byline"]

Disable all E-E-A-T rules

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

Enable only this rule

[rules]
enable = ["eeat/author-byline"]

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

• content/author-info: the per-page inventory of the same markup.
• eeat/author-expertise: author pages and Person schema as expertise indicators.
• eeat/authority-signals: the cloud assessment of attribution in context.
• eeat/ymyl-detection: the topics where attribution matters most.

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
• Article structured data, Google Search Central

Check your site

Run squirrel audit https://example.com and open the E-E-A-T section of the report. The site is reported with the share of content pages that attribute an author. Signed-out local audits need no account and cost nothing. Signed-in audits spend credits.