Can readers see who wrote this?
Enter an article URL. We list the trust signals a reader or a Google quality rater can see on it: byline, author page, schema, dates, About and Contact links, and sources. Each one comes with the evidence and the guideline it maps to.
Validate the whole schema
This checker only asks whether Article and Person markup name an author. The schema markup validator in the AY Rank app reads every JSON-LD and microdata block and lists missing required properties.
No Article schema with an author?
Build Article or BlogPosting JSON-LD with author, datePublished and dateModified, then add it to the page.
Read the article
One GET to the URL, following up to 5 redirects, 6 seconds per request and a 2 MB read cap. Public addresses only.
Find the signals
A small HTML reader walks the page. It skips menus, footers, sidebars and comments, and reads JSON-LD, microdata and meta tags.
Show the evidence
Each of the 11 signals is found or missing, with the text, link or markup that shows it and the guideline it maps to.
Check the linked pages
Up to 3 more requests, one each for the author, About and Contact pages, to see whether they answer 200.
Google's helpful content page asks site owners three plain questions: do pages carry a byline, do bylines lead to more about the author, and can readers reach an About page. Its rater guidelines tell raters to look for the same things. This tool shows what a reader, a rater or a crawler can find on one page, so you can add what is missing.
What the checker reads, and what it does not
- We read the HTML the server sends. JavaScript is not run, so a byline or date added by JavaScript shows as missing. When the page has under 500 characters of visible text, the result says so.
- Menus, footers, sidebars (nav, footer, aside and their ARIA roles) and comment sections are left out of bylines, dates and sources. About and Contact links count anywhere on the page, footer included.
- A byline is an element marked as the author (rel=author, itemprop=author, or a class or id containing author or byline) or a short "By Name" text. "By" inside a long sentence does not count.
- A visible date counts when it sits in a time element, after a label like Published or Updated, inside the byline, in an element named for a date, or as a bare date at the top of the article: in the header that holds the h1, or within 12 text nodes after it.
- Article schema counts when an Article type (Article, BlogPosting, NewsArticle and 15 more) has an author with a name. Text authors, nested objects and @id references are all read.
- About and Contact links must stay on the same site (www and subdomains count). We match paths and link texts in English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch and Arabic. Impressum counts as contact.
- Sources are links to other sites inside the article element, or inside main when there is no article. Share buttons and author links are left out. Links with nofollow, sponsored or ugc still count and are reported.
- There is no score. Google says E-E-A-T itself isn't a specific ranking factor, so the result is a found count and the evidence.
- Limits: 2 MB read, 6 seconds per request, 20 seconds per check, 5 redirects, 3 linked pages. Private and local addresses are refused, and each redirect is checked again.
- The API at /api/v1/eeat-checker allows 30 checks per 60 seconds per IP address. The spec is at /openapi.json.
Sources
Read on 2026-11-11. The quote under each signal is the publisher's own words, in English.
- Google, Search Quality Rater Guidelines (edition of September 11, 2025)https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterhub.com/en//searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf
- Google Search Central, Creating helpful, reliable, people-first contenthttps://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/creating-helpful-content
- schema.org, Article (author, datePublished, dateModified)https://schema.org/Article
- schema.org, Person (url, sameAs)https://schema.org/Person
Worked example: our own blog post
We ran it on ayrank.com/blog/ai-training-vs-ai-grounding on 2026-11-12. It found 8 of 11: a byline, Article schema with a Person author, Person schema with sameAs links, the published date on the page and in markup, the updated date in markup, an About link, and 7 links to sources. Missing: the byline does not link to an author page, the page shows no updated date, and there is no Contact link. Those three fixes are now on our list.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is there an E-E-A-T score?
No. Google does not publish one. Its helpful content page says: "While E-E-A-T itself isn't a specific ranking factor, using a mix of factors that can identify content with good E-E-A-T is useful." A tool that prints an E-E-A-T score out of 100 made up its own scale. This one lists signals and counts them.
What does E-E-A-T stand for?
Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust. Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines define it in section 3.4 and say Trust is the most important member of the E-E-A-T family.
Will adding these signals improve my rankings?
Nobody outside Google can promise that. Raters use the guidelines to judge search results, and the guidelines say no single rating can directly change how a page appears in Google Search. The signals listed here are the ones Google asks site owners to check, so they are worth fixing for readers either way.
Why does it say my byline is missing when I can see it?
Most often the byline is added by JavaScript, which this tool does not run, or it sits in a part of the page we leave out, such as a sidebar. Open the page source and search for the name. If it is not in the HTML, crawlers that do not run JavaScript cannot see it either.
Does a nofollow link still count as a source?
Yes. A reader sees the link and can check the source either way. The tool counts it and reports how many links carry nofollow, sponsored or ugc.
Want us to fix this for you?
Want bylines, author pages and schema fixed across every post? AY Rank sets up the trust signals and the content that AI answer engines cite.