An impartial reference for digital trust.

The National Signaling Authority is an independent standards body dedicated to defining and certifying the signals by which credibility is established across search engines and answer engines.

The web’s trust signals were never designed as a coherent system. They accumulated — markup conventions, citation habits, ranking heuristics, and now the citation behavior of AI answer engines. The result is a landscape where authentic credibility is hard to distinguish from imitation.

The National Signaling Authority was founded to close that gap: to give organizations, platforms, and the public a single, impartial reference for what trustworthy signaling looks like, and a way to prove it.

Our mission

To define open, testable standards for trust signaling; to certify the organizations that meet them; and to maintain a public registry that anyone can verify against — so that a credible signal can always be told apart from a counterfeit one.

What we do

Publish standards. We maintain the Signaling Trust Framework (STF), a series of plain-language, testable standards covering identity, structured data, citation provenance, local signaling, and content authenticity.
Certify compliance. We assess organizations against the framework and authorize those that meet it to display the Signaling Compliance Mark.
Maintain the registry. Every credential we issue is recorded in a public registry, making each mark independently verifiable.
Advance the field. We publish guidance as search and answer engines evolve, keeping the standards current with how credibility is actually evaluated.

Principles

The commitments that govern our work.

Independence

We do not sell rankings, placements, or visibility. Certification reflects only whether the standard is met.

Transparency

Our standards are published openly and every credential is recorded in a registry anyone can inspect.

Testability

A standard that cannot be checked is not a standard. Each STF clause is written to be objectively assessable.

Authenticity

We certify genuine signals, never manipulation. The mark exists to reward what is real.

Currency

The framework is revised as search and answer engines change how they evaluate trust.

Accountability

Certification can be reviewed and withdrawn. Holding the mark is an ongoing commitment, not a one-time event.

Governance

How the standards are maintained

The Signaling Trust Framework is maintained by the Authority’s Standards Committee, which reviews each standard on a published revision cycle. Proposed changes are evaluated against observed practice in search and answer engines, documented, and released with a version reference so that certified organizations can track exactly which edition of the framework applies to them.

Certification decisions are administered separately from standards development by the Office of the Registrar, which conducts assessments, issues credentials, and maintains the public registry. This separation keeps the writing of the standard independent from its application.

A note on scope

The National Signaling Authority is an independent industry standards organization. It is not a government agency and does not act on behalf of any search engine or answer engine. Our authority derives from the rigor and transparency of the framework itself, and from the verifiability of the credentials we issue.

Built on a published standard.

Read the Signaling Trust Framework, or verify a credential in the public registry.

View the standards