Authority signals: an AI read of authorship and citations

What an authority signal is

Authority, in the sense Google’s guidance uses, is whether a page shows who stands behind what it says and what those claims rest on. In practice that is authorship and sourcing.

Markup rules can only see the shapes those take: a Person node, a rel="author" link, an outbound link to a domain on a list. This rule reads the page instead, so it can recognise a byline that is plain text and tell a citation from a footer link to a partner site.

What squirrel checks

The rule runs on every crawled page and reads a result the cloud service produced before the rules ran. It emits a single check named authority-signals:

• Skipped when no result is available for the page, whether because the feature was not prefetched or the service skipped it. Message: Authority signal analysis skipped, with a readable skip reason.
• Warn when the page has no author attribution and zero citations. Message: No author attribution or citations detected on this page. When the page has outbound links, the details add 4 outbound link(s) present but none read as citations. Severity warning, weight 3.
• Pass otherwise. Message: Authority signals: author attributed, 6 citation(s), 14 outbound reference(s), or no author in place of the first part. Any specific signals the service identified are listed as items.

The rule is skipped on soft 404 pages, so a broken template cannot warn about a missing author on every URL.

How to fix it

Add a visible byline with credentials where they are relevant, cite sources for factual claims in the sentences that make them, and link out to the references the argument rests on.

The warn condition needs both halves to be missing. A page with an author and no citations passes, as does a page with citations and no named author.

Enable / disable

Disable this rule

[rules]
disable = ["eeat/authority-signals"]

Related rules

• eeat/author-byline: the pattern-based version of the attribution half.
• eeat/citations: the pattern-based version of the sourcing half.
• content/author-info: the per-page markup inventory.
• eeat/ymyl-detection: the topics where both halves matter 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

Check your site

Run squirrel audit https://example.com and open the E-E-A-T section of the report. Each page is reported with its author, citation and outbound reference counts. Local audits are free.