Does Your Website Say Who’s Behind It?

Short answer first: name one real person, say what they do, and give a phone number and an email. That is the bar. A stranger deciding whether to call you is answering one question before any other — who am I actually dealing with — and most small-business sites never answer it.

This is not about a bigger About page. It is about whether a first-time visitor can say a human name out loud after ten seconds on your homepage.

What does Google’s own documentation ask for?

Google’s guidance on creating helpful content, last updated 10 December 2025, poses it as questions to ask yourself. Is it self-evident to your visitors who authored your content? Do pages carry a byline where one might be expected? Do those bylines lead to further information about the person?

The search quality rater guidelines go further. In the version dated 11 September 2025, Google tells its raters it expects most websites to carry some information about who is responsible for the site and who created the content, plus some contact information, unless there is a good reason for anonymity.

State the limit beside the claim: those guidelines are not ranking rules. The same document says that no single rating can directly affect how a page appears in Google Search. Raters describe what a careful human reader is asked to look for — which happens to be exactly what your customer is doing anyway.

What does usability research say?

Nielsen Norman Group has watched people do this in sessions rather than guessing at it.

• On missing phone numbers. In an article by Anna Kaley published 18 August 2019, a participant describing a company that offers no phone number said: “It makes them seem suspicious to me.”
• On forms as the only route. The same research found that a form standing alone — with no phone or email beside it — reads as a barrier rather than an invitation.
• On photographs. Jakob Nielsen, writing on 31 October 2010, reported that users ignore stock photos of generic people, while photographs of the people who actually work at a company get looked at closely.

That last one is the cheapest fix on this page. A real face, even an imperfect one, outperforms a bought smile.

The two-minute check

On your phone, in this order.

• 1. Your homepage. Read only the first screen and the footer. Out loud, say the name of the business and the name of one real person connected to it. If you cannot, a first-time visitor cannot either.
• 2. Your About page. Count the people named. A name plus one line saying what that person does is the whole bar. Then look at the photographs and ask whether anyone in them actually works there.
• 3. Your contact page. Try to reach a human in one tap. A phone number you can tap, an email you can copy. A form can sit alongside them. On its own, it is not enough.

What is not on the list — your street address

This one gets assumed into a rule, and it is not one. If you work from home, you are not obliged to publish where you sleep.

• Google’s rater guidelines allow for it. They note that a website or content creator may have a legitimate reason for anonymity, and give personal sites omitting a home address or phone number as the example.
• The FTC’s email rule accepts a post office box. CAN-SPAM requires a valid physical postal address in commercial email — a registered PO box counts.
• Google Business Profile tells service-area businesses to hide the address outright.

Say where you are based and how to reach you. That is the bar. “Richmond and the Tri-Cities” is an answer; a street number is not required to make it one.

What does good look like?

• A named person on the homepage, with one line on what they do.
• An About page that names people, not a decade. “Serving clients since 2009” names nobody.
• A phone number and an email, not only a form.
• Real photographs of the people who actually do the work.

One thing I will label as preference, not a rule: a one-person business writing “we” everywhere. It is not wrong and plenty of good firms do it. It does sit oddly beside a page promising that you will work directly with one named person.

I ran Artifex Web through this

My name was on the homepage and the About page. My phone number and email were both on the contact page. And there was no photograph of me anywhere on the site — a site telling you it is one named man, with no picture of him. That is fixed now.

Your turn: open your homepage and name one real person.

Every source below was opened and re-checked on 21 September 2026. Google’s Search Central pages carry a last-updated date and change without notice; the rater guidelines are a dated PDF. Nothing here is a ranking promise.