Contact page: finding it and counting the contact methods

What a contact page is for

A contact page is the answer to how do I reach these people. It carries at minimum a way to get in touch, and usually several: an email address, a phone number, a form, a postal address.

More than one method matters because they fail differently. A form is easy to build and impossible to verify from outside; a mailto: address and a tel: number are things a reader can check and use immediately.

What squirrel checks

The rule is site-wide. It finds the contact page by a URL path matching one of the multilingual contact patterns, or by a page whose structured data declares the ContactPage type. It emits up to two checks:

• Skipped when no pages were crawled. Message: No pages available for analysis.
• contact-page passes when a crawled page is the contact page. Message: Contact page exists, with the URL as the value.
• contact-page reports info when no crawled page is the contact page but a crawled page links to one the crawl did not fetch. Message: Contact page linked but not crawled, with the link target as the value and the linking page in the details. No further checks run, because the page was never read.
• contact-page warns instead when the internal link probe requested that uncrawled target and got a 4xx or 5xx. Message: Contact 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.
• contact-page warns when there is neither a crawled contact page nor a link to one. Message: No Contact page found, with Create /contact page as the value. No further checks run. Severity warning, weight 5.
• contact-methods passes when the page carries both a mailto: and a tel: link. Message: Contact page has multiple contact methods, listing them.
• contact-methods reports info when it carries exactly one. Message: Contact page has limited contact methods, with Consider adding email, phone, and address as the value.

A crawl that excludes the contact page’s path, or reaches its page limit first, never fetches it. A link to the same host whose href matches one of the contact 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, and no extra requests are made: the only status the rule can report is one the internal link probe already recorded. To have the page and its contact methods checked, let the crawl fetch it.

Only mailto: and tel: links count as methods. A contact form is not detected, so a page with a form and no direct address emits no methods check at all. The ContactPoint schema type is deliberately not used as a fallback, because it is usually an Organization property present on every page rather than a marker of this page.

How to fix it

<a href="mailto:hello@example.com">hello@example.com</a>
<a href="tel:+61292223333">(02) 9222 3333</a>

Publish a real address and a real number as links, not as images or as text a reader has to retype. Keep the contact link in the footer so it is reachable from anywhere.

A form is fine as an addition. It is weak on its own, because there is no way for a reader to tell whether anyone reads it.

Enable / disable

Disable this rule

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

Disable all E-E-A-T rules

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

Enable only this rule

[rules]
enable = ["eeat/contact-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

• links/tel-mailto: whether those links are well formed and match their text.
• eeat/physical-address: the address that belongs on the same page.
• eeat/about-page: the other page a reader checks.
• security/form-captcha: protecting the contact form from spam.

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
• ContactPage, Schema.org

Check your site

Run squirrel audit https://example.com and open the E-E-A-T section of the report. The contact page is reported with its URL and the methods found on it. Signed-out local audits need no account and cost nothing. Signed-in audits spend credits.