THE RUBRIC
E-E-A-T & trust signals
Whether there is anything here to trust or attribute.
Checks 15 12% of 129
Weight 15% of the overall score
Why it is weighted this way
Weighted at 15% and rising in importance, because attribution is precisely what an answer engine needs in order to cite you rather than someone else.
What this category covers
- Named authorship and author profiles
- Published and updated dates
- Organisation identity and contact details
- Whether claims are sourced
- Editorial policy and correction signals
- Author expertise relative to the subject
Representative checks
A sample of what sits in this category, with how each one is decided and who is allowed to fix it. The full list of 129 lives in the product.
| Check | Method | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Named author with a real profile An engine that cannot characterise the source often prefers one it can. | Rule | Human |
| Published and updated dates present Freshness cannot be assessed without them. | Rule | Auto |
| Organisation identity and contact details Anonymous sites are a weaker citation for a model to stand behind. | Rule | Human |
| Claims are sourced Model-judged, advisory, and never auto-fixed. The engine has no basis to invent a citation. | Model | Human |
What usually goes wrong
- No named author anywhere, leaving an engine with nothing to characterise
- Missing dates, which makes freshness impossible to assess
- Statistics quoted without a source
- A contact page with a form and no organisation identity behind it
When these checks return unmeasured
A check in this category that cannot run is reported as unmeasured and counted in the denominator. It is never rounded up to a pass, which is the difference between a score that bounds its own claim and one that implies it examined everything.
- Author or organisation markup is absent entirely, so there is nothing to evaluate
- A model-judged expertise check could not run
Where to start
- Add author, date and organisation to your top pages. Three lines of markup.
- Source the statistics you already quote.
- Give authors real profile pages rather than a name in plain text.