For years I've had a small habit at the bottom of any website I visit for the first time: I scroll all the way down and read the footer. The footer is where the actual company lives — the address, the legal name, the little pile of links that no product manager fought for. When the footer is thoughtful, I trust the site a little more. When it is missing, I close the tab.

The footer has been disappearing lately, in stages. First the copyright year vanished, because someone realised that maintaining a hard-coded number was somehow harder than not maintaining it. Then the site map went, absorbed into the main navigation. Then the small print about the legal entity. Then, on some sites, everything below the last content block; the page just ends, and the browser fills the rest with itself.

You notice the absence most on the sites that most need the reassurance. A shop you have never heard of, a health article of uncertain provenance, a tool asking for your email. On the old web you would scroll to the bottom and find a name, a registration number, a physical address — small proofs that a real entity stood behind the page. Increasingly you scroll and find nothing, and the nothing is its own kind of answer.

This is not a design trend so much as a slow accounting decision. Footers are outside the analytical funnel. Nobody's KPI depends on the footer. The default action, when a growth team looks at a page and asks what can be cut, is to cut the parts that don't measurably drive whatever the team measures. Over time, this eats the footer.

The irony is that the footer was always the cheapest trust signal a site could offer. It cost nothing to maintain and it did a quiet, disproportionate amount of work: it said, in effect, we are willing to be found. Cutting it saves a few square pixels and a line of markup, and it removes the one place on the page where a site admitted to being run by people who could be held to account.

There is a legal floor to this, in some jurisdictions — an imprint requirement, a mandated way to identify who runs a commercial site. Where those rules bite, the footer survives, which tells you something: left purely to product instinct, the identifying information goes, and only an external obligation keeps it. Trust, it turns out, is not something most funnels will preserve unprompted.

The cost is that you can no longer tell, at a glance, who a website belongs to. This used to be a basic property of the web — that at the bottom of any page there was, at minimum, a name and a country. Now you can visit ten sites in a row and not learn who wrote any of them. On the internet where anyone can be a publisher, we have started to make the publisher invisible.

I don't think this reverses on its own. What might help is a small movement — probably by publishers who care about being trusted — to put the footer back on purpose. The address. The names of the editors. The email of a human being. It reads as almost radical now, which tells you something about where the medium has drifted.