- 29 of 200
- AI Search Visibility & GEO
- Brand Knowledge Graph & Authority Signals
- Low
Short answer: check 29 looks for a copyright notice, usually a "©" line in the footer. You don't need one for your work to be protected: in the UK and the US, copyright is automatic. A notice still tells people, and anything reading the page, who owns the content and which legal entity is behind the site. It takes one line.
What Crawl Audit checks
- Pass: the page's HTML contains "©", "©" or the word "copyright", or a
<meta name="copyright">tag. - Warning: none of those.
Is a copyright notice required?
- UK: the government's copyright guidance says "You get copyright protection automatically", and "Whether you mark the work or not does not affect the level of protection you have."
- US: the Copyright Office says "Copyright notice is optional for works published on or after March 1, 1989". It notes one benefit: a notice may stop someone who copied your work from claiming they didn't know it was protected (the "innocent infringement" defence).
So it's not a legal requirement. It's a short, useful statement of who's responsible for the site.
What a good notice says
© 2026 Example Trading Ltd. Registered in England and Wales, company no. 01234567.- The year, or a range of years.
- The legal entity, not just the brand, if they differ.
- Optionally, the company number and where it's registered. In the UK, company websites are expected to show that anyway.
Our footer does this: "© 2026 DevMarDe · Est. 2022", then "DevMarDe is a trading name of Designn Space Ltd, registered in England and Wales", with the company number linked to the public register.
Machine-readable copyright and licences
schema.org has properties for this on any creative work: copyrightHolder ("The party holding the legal copyright to the CreativeWork"), copyrightYear and license ("A license document that applies to this content, typically indicated by URL").
Google uses licence information for images: "providing licensing information can make the image eligible for the Licensable badge" in image results. That needs the image's contentUrl and a license URL. If you sell or license your photos, this is worth adding. Otherwise the footer line is enough.
Sources
- GOV.UK, How copyright protects your work, checked 3 October 2026.
- US Copyright Office, Circular 3: Copyright Notice (revised March 2021).
- schema.org, copyrightHolder and license; Google Search Central, Image metadata.
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