E-E-A-T / Trust Signals Checker
One of the free tools from KinetixSEO, an SEO and AI-citation (GEO) checker. This tool checks any page for the "does this look like a real, established business" signals that both traditional search engines and AI answer engines weight when deciding whether to rank or cite a page: discoverable privacy-policy, contact, and about pages, author credentials on sensitive topics, a recognizable trust or review badge, cookie-consent compliance, and intrusive mobile interstitials. None of these directly move rankings on their own — but their absence is a well-documented thin-site / low-trust signal, and it's one of the cheapest things on this list to fix.
Frequently asked questions
What does E-E-A-T mean and why does Google care about it?
E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness — the criteria in Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines used to judge whether content deserves to rank, especially on YMYL ("Your Money or Your Life") topics like health, finance, or legal advice. It isn't one ranking factor Google computes directly; it's a cluster of signals — named authors with verifiable credentials, transparent ownership, accurate contact information, a track record of accuracy — that both human quality raters and automated systems use to separate genuinely helpful content from thin or manipulative pages.
Why do a privacy policy, contact page, and about page affect SEO?
None of these pages directly boosts rankings on their own, but their absence is one of the clearest "thin site" signals search engines look for. A site with no way to identify who runs it, no way to contact them, and no disclosure of what happens to visitors' data reads as either an abandoned project or a site deliberately hiding its operator — both correlate strongly with low-quality or manipulative content. Adding all three removes a specific, well-documented reason for a quality system to discount your site.
Why do AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AI Overviews care about trust signals?
AI answer engines cite sources and increasingly need to justify to users why a claim is trustworthy — citing an anonymous, unverifiable site is a reputational and legal risk for the AI vendor if the claim turns out to be wrong. In practice this means pages covering sensitive topics need a named author with a verifiable profile link, and sites need discoverable "who is behind this" signals — the same way a skeptical human reader checks for a real business before trusting a claim, rather than an astroturfed page with no operator behind it.
How do I add a proper about page?
Publish it at a discoverable URL — /about, /over-ons, /ueber-uns, or the equivalent in your site's language — and link to it from the footer or main nav so both readers and crawlers can find it without searching. Describe who actually runs the business: founders or team, when it was established, and what it does — not generic marketing copy. Optionally mark it up with schema.org AboutPage structured data so language-independent parsers, including AI crawlers, can identify it even if they don't recognize the URL pattern or link text in your language.
What counts as a "contact" signal — do I need a full contact page?
No. A full contact page (/contact) is the strongest signal, but a visible mailto: email address in the footer, or ContactPoint/telephone/email fields in your Organization structured data, are equally valid and will be detected. What doesn't count: a contact form with no visible email or phone anywhere on the page, since a check for reachability can't parse an interactive form.
This is one check from KinetixSEO's full SEO/GEO audit. Want the complete picture — Core Web Vitals, AI-citation readiness, technical SEO health, and tailored fixes? Run the free full checker.