Does your site show who stands behind it?

By Matt Kerr·Published 11 November 2026

It checks for trust pages, a route to contact you and article authorship signals.

What Check Engine measures

The test looks for about and contact pages, an enquiry form with at least 2 fields, and a recognised privacy policy. Missing contact details raise the trust-page finding from low to medium severity. Author names can come from markup or bylines in up to 2000 characters from each of the first 40 successful pages. At least 3 indexable pages with article markup are needed for the missing-author finding. For example, an enquiry form with 2 fields can satisfy the contact-route test.

The check reads page addresses, forms, business text and article markup. It looks for who publishes the content and how a visitor can contact them. You need to verify the named people and their roles.

How to read the result

Missing authorship is low severity. Trust-page findings name the contact, policy or authorship information the check could not find. An enquiry route can satisfy the contact check without a page named Contact. Review who publishes the content and how visitors can reach them.

Why it matters

Readers need a way to understand who publishes a page and how to reach them. These observable signals can help with that task, but the code's presence checks do not turn a byline into proof of expertise.

How to fix it

Publish accurate information about the business and give visitors a working contact route. Attach the real author or responsible organisation to articles. Keep the privacy page linked where people can find it. Check forms and schema before adding duplicate pages merely to satisfy a path-based cue.

Trust and authorship signals, and what a crawler can actually see

What we found in field audits

Problems in Content quality were found on 14 of the 14 sites we audited. These are area totals. Read the field-audit method.

Method note

backend/seo_engine/checks/content.py, eeat, revision 0bb8e8d3.