Methodology

E-E-A-T Signals

Authority Signals · Rescoped to the evidence

What this check reads on your page

Four English phrase families are counted in the visible text: experience (years of experience, case studies), expertise (certified, written by), authority (featured in, trusted by) and trust (privacy policy, customer support), scored on how many distinct phrases in each family appear. The check then looks at the markup for an author element such as a byline, rel=author or itemprop=author, an author bio, a publish date in a time element or a dated class, and an update date in an element whose class says updated or modified. Authority also gets two markup probes that work in any language: a sameAs declaration in the JSON-LD, and links to record hosts such as Wikipedia, Wikidata, Crunchbase, ORCID or a LinkedIn company page. A page with no author markup is capped at 65.

Our verdict on the evidence

Rescoped to the evidence No study tests author bios as a causal AI-citation lever; the real authority channel is off-site brand footprint. On-page bylines and dates are kept as best-practice hygiene at reduced weight.

Cross-engine citation-driver study, deep vs shallow content and freshness gatekeeping (arXiv 2605.25517) · Google Search Central guidance on AI features (no special schema needed, no ideal page length)

This score reads the page's own account of itself and nothing else: it cannot see whether the author is known, whether the credentials are real or whether anyone off-site vouches for the brand, and those are the things that move retrieval. Read it as a check on whether the page states who wrote it, when, and by what right, in a form a parser can find. An engine that has already retrieved the page uses those fields to decide how to attribute it; it does not use them to find the page.

What it is worth

28% of Authority Signals, which is 7 points of the overall 100.

On a page written in Japanese, Korean or Traditional Chinese, only the parts of this check that work in any language are scored, over a budget of 69 rather than 100, and the result is rescaled to 100 so it stays comparable.

How audited pages score on it

Based on 8,875 audited pages.

The median page scores 24, and the middle half of pages score between 8 and 38.

  • Good (75 to 100)63 (1%)
  • Moderate (50 to 74)901 (10%)
  • Needs work (25 to 49)3,240 (37%)
  • Critical (0 to 24)4,671 (53%)

89% of audited pages score below 50 on it.

Where it fails most and least

Industries that fail it most

Industries that fail it least

How to fix it

  • Add a visible byline with rel="author" or itemprop="author", and a short bio that states credentials.
  • Publish the date in a time element with a datetime attribute, and show a last-updated date in an element whose class says so (updated, modified) when you revise the page.
  • Add sameAs links in the Organization or Person JSON-LD to your Wikipedia, Wikidata, Crunchbase or LinkedIn record.
  • State experience in the phrases the check reads: 'years of experience', 'case studies', 'certified'.

What has changed in this factor

5 versions describe changes that could not be attributed to individual factors, so any of them may have changed this one; they are on the full changelog.

The other factors

All factors, and how the score is built