Author expertise: bio pages and Person schema

What an expertise signal is

A byline says who wrote something. An expertise signal says why they were the person to write it: a bio page with credentials, a professional profile, a Person node in the structured data linking the two.

Google’s guidance asks about the degree of expertise behind content and about who is responsible for it. On health, finance and legal topics, that is the difference between a name and a qualification. This rule looks for the infrastructure that carries it rather than judging the credentials themselves.

What squirrel checks

The rule is site-wide. It counts pages whose path matches /author/, /authors, /team, /contributors or /about-the-author, and separately checks whether any crawled page declares the Person schema type. It emits a single check named author-expertise:

• Skipped when no pages were crawled. Message: No pages available for analysis.
• Pass when either signal is present. Message: Author expertise signals found, listing what was found as 4 author page(s) and Person schema.
• Info when neither is. Message: Limited author expertise signals, with Consider adding author pages with credentials as the value.

The check is structural. It does not read the bio pages or look for credentials in them, so a /team page with four names and no detail passes. Severity info, weight 4.

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

<script type="application/ld+json">
{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"Person","name":"Jane Diaz","jobTitle":"Registered Dietitian","url":"https://example.com/authors/jane-diaz"}
</script>

Give each regular author a page that says what they know and how they know it: qualifications, relevant experience, where else they publish. Mark it up as a Person and link the byline to it.

For content where a reviewer signs off, such as medical writing, name the reviewer and their credentials as well as the writer.

Enable / disable

Disable this rule

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

Disable all E-E-A-T rules

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

Enable only this rule

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

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/author-byline: whether the content is attributed at all.
• eeat/ymyl-detection: the topics where credentials matter most.
• eeat/disclaimers: what those pages need alongside the credentials.
• content/author-info: the per-page markup inventory.

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
• Person, Schema.org

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 author pages and Person schema found. Signed-out local audits need no account and cost nothing. Signed-in audits spend credits.