Authoritative citations: sources a reader can check

What a citation is here

A citation is an outbound link to the source a claim rests on. It lets a reader verify the claim without taking your word for it, and it is one of the few outward signals that content was researched rather than assembled.

Which sources count depends on the topic. For health content that is health authorities and peer-reviewed research; for anything statistical it is the body that published the numbers. This rule uses a fixed list as a proxy rather than judging relevance, so treat a low count as a prompt rather than a verdict.

What squirrel checks

The rule is site-wide. It walks the external links on every crawled page and counts those whose hostname matches one of its authoritative domains. It emits a single check named citations:

• Skipped when no pages were crawled. Message: No pages available for analysis.
• Pass when any authoritative link was found. Message: 24 authoritative citation(s) found, with Across 9 page(s) as the value.
• Info when none was. Message: No authoritative citations detected, with Consider citing .gov, .edu, or industry sources as the value.

The list has fourteen entries: gov, edu, who.int, cdc.gov, nih.gov, fda.gov, mayo.clinic, webmd, healthline, wikipedia.org, reuters.com, bbc.com, nytimes.com, wsj.com. Matching is a substring test on the hostname, so gov and edu catch any .gov or .edu domain and also anything else containing those letters in its hostname. The list is US and English-centric, and a site citing national statistics offices or journals outside it will report zero. Severity info, weight 3.

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

Link the claim to its source, in the sentence where the claim is made rather than in a list at the end. Prefer the primary source over an article about it.

A zero here on a site that cites journals or a national statistics office is a limitation of the list, not a finding. Check the outbound links yourself before acting on it.

Enable / disable

Disable this rule

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

Disable all E-E-A-T rules

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

Enable only this rule

[rules]
enable = ["eeat/citations"]

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/article-links: the external link minimum by article length.
• eeat/authority-signals: the cloud assessment of what reads as a citation.
• links/broken-external-links: whether those sources still resolve.
• eeat/ymyl-detection: the topics where sourcing 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

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 its authoritative citation count and the pages carrying them. Signed-out local audits need no account and cost nothing. Signed-in audits spend credits.