About, Contact and Privacy pages

What this check measures

We read the links on your homepage (navigation, body and footer) and look for an About page, a Contact page and a privacy policy, plus Terms, a team page and, for articles and regulated industries, an editorial policy. We load the About, Contact and Privacy pages we find and record the answer and how much text they hold. A phone number, a street address or a contact form on the homepage also counts as contact information, and on a one-page site a section of the homepage reached by an #about or #contact link counts as that page. When no link exists we try a few common addresses such as /about and /contact. We make at most a handful of these requests per audit.

Why it matters

Google's helpful-content guidance asks whether content shows background about the author or the site that publishes it, "such as through links to an author page or a site's About page", and says that of the parts of E-E-A-T, trust is most important. Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines tell raters to find who is responsible for a website and to look for About, contact and customer service information, which they call extremely important for sites that handle money. These pages are also where answer engines find the plain facts that describe your business. E-E-A-T is a framework Google's raters use to judge results, not a score Google computes for your site.

How we score it

Editorial, so it is capped at medium and can lower a pillar only up to a fixed limit. A missing Contact route is the most serious gap; a missing About page or privacy policy is smaller, and larger for law, medical, accounting and funding businesses where visitors share sensitive information. Terms, team and editorial-policy links are notes and never lower the score. A page we found a link for but could not load, or a common address we could not try within the audit's limits, is never counted as missing, and if we could not check any of the three pages the finding is not scored at all.

Confidence-flag rules

HIGH when every page we checked loaded and the verdict rests on what it returned. MEDIUM when a role is missing, because a page can exist without being linked from the homepage.

Common mistakes

• Linking the About page only from a menu that loads with JavaScript, so a plain fetch of the homepage shows no link.
• A Contact page that is a bare form with no phone number, email or address.
• A privacy policy that lives on another company's site or behind a login.
• Relying on a chat widget instead of a contact page.

How to fix it

Link an About page that names the people and the business, a Contact page with a phone number and street address, and a privacy policy, from the footer of every page. Keep each page on your own domain and make sure it loads without a login.

Primary sources

• Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content (last updated 2026-10-05, accessed 2026-10-07)

  Google Search Central

• Search Quality Rater Guidelines, September 11, 2025 edition, sections 2.5.2, 2.5.3 and 3.3.2 (accessed 2026-10-07)

  Google

• Our latest update to the quality rater guidelines: E-A-T gets an extra E for Experience (2022-12-15, accessed 2026-10-07)

  Google Search Central

Changelog

• 2026-10-07 · New. Part of the trust review: we now confirm each page by loading it before we ever say it is missing.
• 2026-10-07 · One-page sites: About and Contact sections reached by #about and #contact links count, and any one of a phone number, street address or contact form on the homepage meets Contact.