What are trust signals on a website?
Five of them, in this rubric, totalling weight 5: HTTPS (1), contact details (1.25), testimonials (1), pricing (0.75) and Organization-style structured data (1). Every one is a yes or no test. This is the only category in the rubric with no numeric threshold anywhere, because you either have a phone number on the page or you do not.
Contact details carry the most weight at 1.25, ahead of HTTPS and testimonials at 1 each. Pricing is the lightest at 0.75, which reflects that plenty of legitimate businesses do not publish prices, while almost none have a good reason to hide how to reach them.
The identity schema check looks at the JSON-LD @type values on the page and passes when any of them matches Organization, LocalBusiness or Corporation. This is the machine-readable version of saying who you are, and it is what lets an answer engine attribute a claim to a named business rather than to an anonymous page.
One subtlety separates "we looked and it was not there" from "we never looked". An observed absence, for example a page that was inspected and had no testimonials, scores 0.0 and costs you. An unobserved fact is skipped entirely and costs nothing. The identity schema check goes further and is skipped when the page has no JSON-LD at all, so a page with no structured data is not penalised twice, once here and once in SEO.
These are heuristics for whether the signal is present, not judgements of whether it is convincing. A testimonial from a made-up person and a case study from a household name both register the same way. Trust carries a weight of 0.9 in the composite score.
What is measured, and how it is scored
5 checks make up the Trust Signals score. Weights are relative within the category and sum to 5.
| Check | Rule | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| Whether the page is served over HTTPS | Pass or fail, no threshold. Served over HTTPS scores 1.0, served over plain HTTP scores 0.0. | 1 |
| Whether contact details appear on the page | Pass or fail, no threshold. Detected contact details score 1.0, none detected scores 0.0. The heaviest check in the category. | 1.25 |
| Whether testimonials or other social proof appear on the page | Pass or fail, no threshold. Detected testimonials score 1.0, none detected scores 0.0. The content of the testimonial is not assessed. | 1 |
| Whether pricing is published on the page | Pass or fail, no threshold. Detected pricing scores 1.0, none detected scores 0.0. Weighted lightest in the category at 0.75. | 0.75 |
| Whether the page's JSON-LD identifies the business | Passes when any JSON-LD @type matches Organization, LocalBusiness or Corporation, scoring 1.0. Other schema types present but no identity type scores 0.0. Skipped entirely when the page has no JSON-LD at all. | 1 |
Trust Signals questions
Which trust signal matters most in the score?+
Contact details, at weight 1.25 of the category's 5. HTTPS, testimonials and Organization schema each carry 1, and published pricing carries 0.75. All five are yes or no tests with no partial credit.
Does a site lose points for not publishing prices?+
Yes, but less than for anything else in the category. The pricing check is worth 0.75 of 5, the lightest weight in Trust Signals, which acknowledges that many businesses quote rather than list.
What counts as Organization schema?+
Any JSON-LD @type on the page matching Organization, LocalBusiness or Corporation. A page carrying only Article or BreadcrumbList schema scores zero on this check, while a page with no JSON-LD at all has the check skipped rather than failed.
Can the audit tell whether a testimonial is genuine?+
No. The social proof check detects that testimonials are present and scores 1.0 or 0.0 on that basis alone. It does not verify the person, the company, or the claim.
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