Editorial policy: publishing how the content gets made

What an editorial policy is

An editorial policy describes how content on a site is produced: who writes it, who reviews it, how facts are checked, what happens when something is wrong, and who has a say in what gets published.

It is standard at news organisations and increasingly common on any site publishing at scale. Its value is that it is checkable: a correction policy means a reader can see whether corrections actually appear.

What squirrel checks

The rule is site-wide. It matches each crawled page’s URL path against the multilingual editorial policy patterns and collects every match. It emits a single check named editorial-policy:

• Skipped when no pages were crawled. Message: No pages available for analysis.
• Pass when at least one page matches. Message: 2 policy page(s) found, listing each path.
• Info when none does. Message: No editorial/content policy pages found, with Consider adding for content-heavy sites as the value.

The match is on the URL path only, so a policy published on an unusual slug or inside the About page is not found. Severity info, weight 3.

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

How to fix it

Publish a page covering how content is created and reviewed, how facts are checked, how corrections are handled, and how editorial decisions stay independent of commercial ones. Link it from the footer or the About page.

Write what you actually do. A policy describing a review process nobody follows is worse than none.

Enable / disable

Disable this rule

[rules]
disable = ["eeat/editorial-policy"]

Disable all E-E-A-T rules

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

Enable only this rule

[rules]
enable = ["eeat/editorial-policy"]

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/about-page: the page this one usually sits beside.
• eeat/author-expertise: who the policy says is qualified to write.
• eeat/ymyl-detection: the topics where a review process matters most.
• eeat/trust-signals: the other claims a reader can check.

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 policy page found is listed by path. Signed-out local audits need no account and cost nothing. Signed-in audits spend credits.