When should you use Footer has the required links?
footer-compliance · visual · required
When should you use this check?
Run this whenever the footer is inherited rather than authored — which is nearly always. The footer is a shared partial, so a change to it lands on every page at once, and the elements it carries are exactly the ones nobody looks at until someone official asks for them. It is worth running across a spread of templates rather than one page, because footers most often break per-template: the marketing pages keep theirs and the app or checkout pages quietly lose it.
When should you not?
Skip it on pages that intentionally have no footer — a full-screen checkout step, an embedded widget, a print or export view, a bare confirmation screen. It is also the wrong check for verifying that your privacy policy is *correct* or current; it confirms the route to it exists on the page. If the question is whether the policy content satisfies a regulation, that is a legal review, not a page audit.
What does it inspect?
Verify footer includes required brand elements
What does a failure mean?
A failure names which required element it could not find. The likely cause is structural rather than editorial: a layout that does not include the footer partial, a conditional that hides it on this template, or a link that was renamed and no longer reads as the thing being looked for. Because the footer is shared, one failing page usually means a class of pages is failing — treat the finding as a question about the template, not the URL.
What are the Standard defaults — and why?
One parameter carries the check: `footerRequirements`, a written requirement rather than a numeric threshold. Its Standard default asks that the footer be visible and include a copyright notice, a privacy policy link, and a terms or conditions link — the three elements common to almost every commercial site, stated in plain language rather than as a selector. There is no tunable number here because the check is a presence judgement against a stated rule; the rule itself is the dial.
How does an agent call it?
{
"type": "url",
"url": "https://example.com",
"validations": [
"footer-compliance"
]
}
Who governs the Standard?
Schemafirst.org publishes community-governed standards for digital QA. ArbiterQA is a sponsor and commercial licensee of those standards; citation does not mean Schemafirst operates ArbiterQA.
Author ArbiterQA · Reviewed by ArbiterQA · 2026-08-14