Articles have authors

author · Identity · weight 10 of 145

What we check

On the pages we sample that are articles, we look for an author: a structured data author that is a Person with a name, a link marked rel="author", or a byline that links to a page on your own site. The score is the fraction of articles that have one. If none of the pages we look at are articles, the check is skipped.

What counts as an article: besides the sampled pages, we also look at the two newest posts in your feed. If any of them is labelled as an Article or BlogPosting in its structured data, we take your labels at their word, and only labelled pages count. Otherwise, a page counts if it has a single <article> element (and no form), or more than 400 words of content — unless its structured data already says it’s some other kind of page. An author given only as a bare name, not a Person, doesn’t count. A byline that links somewhere else doesn’t either.

Why it matters

AI assistants weigh who said something, not only what was said. An article with a named author who has a page about them is a claim someone stands behind; an anonymous one is just text. Authorship is also how your writing gets connected to you — so an assistant asked about your field can say “as Example’s founder wrote…”, and link to it.

How to pass

1. Add a Person as the author in each article’s structured data, with a name and a url:

   {
     "@context": "https://schema.org",
     "@type": "BlogPosting",
     "headline": "How we price projects",
     "author": {
       "@type": "Person",
       "name": "Alex Example",
       "url": "https://example.com/about"
     },
     "publisher": { "@id": "https://example.com/#org" }
   }

2. Show a byline on the page, and link it to your about page:

   <p class="byline">By <a href="/about" rel="author">Alex Example</a></p>

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