Becoming the cited source
Authorship and Trust Signals Answer Engines Can Verify
The short answer
Answer engines weigh who stands behind a statement as well as what it says. We make authorship explicit: named authors and reviewers, their credentials, and the organization they work for, stated on the page and in structured data that links each person to the same identity on every site where they appear.
What We State, and How
Authors and Reviewers
Who wrote a page and who reviewed it, named on the page and linked in the structured data.
Credentials
Qualifications, professional appointments, and the body that issued or regulates them, each stated so it can be checked at source.
The Organization
The organization behind the content, with its registered details, linked to the people who work for it.
Dates
When a page was published and when it was last reviewed, so an answer engine can judge whether a statement is current.
One Identity Across Every Site
Many organizations publish across several domains: a corporate site, product sites, and a knowledge hub. If each one describes the same expert or the same company differently, answer engines see several weaker identities instead of one strong one.
We give each person and organization a single permanent identifier and use it everywhere. This site is an example. Every page points to the same H D Fraser and the same H D Fraser & Associates identities that are anchored on hdfraser.com.
Only What Is True
We mark up credentials, reviews, and affiliations only when they are real and verifiable. Inflated or invented trust signals are a liability: they can be checked, and when they fail the check they damage the credibility of everything else on the page.
See it in practice
Built and Run by Us
CQIP Trust Declaration
Our WordPress plugin that states human-declared experience, expertise, authority, and trust as structured data. Static sites get the same through CQIP Static templates.
Questions
Frequently Asked Questions
Does structured authorship guarantee that answer engines will cite us?
No. Nothing guarantees citation. Clear, verifiable authorship makes your content easier to trust and attribute correctly, which improves the odds.
Do our authors need public profiles?
It helps. A professional profile or a regulator listing gives answer engines something to check a credential against, but it is not required to start.
We publish on several websites. Does each need its own setup?
Each site outputs its own structured data, but they all point to the same identities, so the effort compounds rather than repeats.
Keep reading
Related
Start with a Confidential Chat
A no-obligation conversation with H D Fraser about how answer engines represent your organization today, and what a privacy-first approach would involve. NDA on request.