Trust signals: reviews, testimonials and social proof

What a trust signal is

A trust signal is evidence from somewhere other than your own marketing copy: customer reviews, testimonials, certifications, membership of a professional body, awards.

They work by being checkable. A rating with reviews behind it, or a named customer who can be looked up, carries weight that a claim about quality does not. Marked up as structured data, an aggregate rating can also appear in search results.

What squirrel checks

The rule is site-wide. It looks for two signals: any page whose structured data declares Review or AggregateRating, and any page whose URL path matches testimonial, review or customer-stories. It emits a single check named trust-signals:

• Skipped when no pages were crawled. Message: No pages available for analysis.
• Pass when either was found. Message: 2 trust signal(s) detected, listing them as Review/Rating schema and Testimonials section.
• Info when neither was. Message: Limited trust signals detected, with Consider adding reviews, testimonials, or certifications as the value.

Both tests are coarse. Security and payment badges are not detected, certifications are not detected, and testimonials rendered on a page whose URL says nothing about them are not detected either. A pass means these two markers were present, not that the site is well trusted. Severity info, weight 3.

How to fix it

{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"Product","name":"Widget","aggregateRating":{"@type":"AggregateRating","ratingValue":"4.6","reviewCount":"128"}}

Publish real reviews with names and dates, and mark up the aggregate rating so it is machine-readable. Put the strongest proof where the decision happens: the product page, the pricing page, the checkout.

Note that this example alone will not satisfy the rule. The parser collects top-level and @graph node types, so an AggregateRating nested inside a Product is recorded as Product. Detection needs a Review or AggregateRating node of its own, or a URL matching the testimonial patterns.

Do not mark up ratings you cannot back with visible reviews on the page. Google’s review snippet guidelines require the rating to be about the page’s own subject and visible to the reader.

Enable / disable

Disable this rule

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

Disable all E-E-A-T rules

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

Enable only this rule

[rules]
enable = ["eeat/trust-signals"]

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

• schema/review: the review markup and its requirements.
• schema/rating-scope: whether the rating is attached to the right thing.
• eeat/about-page: the page that carries the rest of the case.
• eeat/citations: evidence of a different kind.

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

• Review snippet structured data, Google Search Central
• 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 the trust signals detected. Signed-out local audits need no account and cost nothing. Signed-in audits spend credits.