In short. Person structured data describes an individual and can identify an article author through a name and an identifying page link.

Definition: Schema.org defines Person as a person who may be alive, dead, undead, or fictional. Person structured data describes that person through named properties; an article can identify its author by placing a Person object in its author property.

Key facts

Schema.org's Person definition includes properties such as name, jobTitle, and url for describing a person.
Schema.org's author property accepts a Person or an Organization as the author of content or a rating.
As of 17 October 2026, Google's Article documentation recommends identifying authors with their type and a url or sameAs link.
Google's ProfilePage documentation requires mainEntity to identify the person or organization a profile page describes.

Which properties describe an author's identity?

Schema.org's Person vocabulary defines name as the item's name and url as its URL. The jobTitle property records the person's professional role. These fields give different parts of an author description their own labels.

The sameAs property links to a reference page that unambiguously identifies the same entity. Its definition gives an official website and a Wikidata entry as examples. A link used here needs to identify the person represented in the markup.

For employment, the same vocabulary defines worksFor as a relationship to an organization the person works for. This provides a separate place to describe the employer alongside the person's name and role.

How does an article identify its author?

Schema.org's author definition expresses authorship as a property of the content. A nested Person object describes the individual occupying that role.

Google's Article author guidance recommends a link to an identifying page, such as a biography or social profile. JSON-LD is a structured data format that Google's general guidelines recommend. The following fragment uses the Willow Lane author from Google's example. This fragment illustrates the author relationship within an article:

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Article",
  "author": {
    "@type": "Person",
    "name": "Willow Lane",
    "url": "https://www.example.com/staff/willow_lane"
  }
}

The same guidance recommends including every visible author, with each author in a separate object. It reserves author.name for the name itself; a job title belongs in jobTitle, and a publisher belongs in publisher.

How can the markup be checked against the page?

Google's ProfilePage guidance describes a profile through mainEntity, with Person as the type for an individual. For an internal author profile, the Article guidance recommends profile page markup. This connects the article's identifying link to a page focused on that author.

Google's general structured data guidelines require markup to represent visible page content accurately. A practical review compares the marked-up name and role with the byline and biography, then checks the identifying links. The guidelines also name the Rich Results Test and URL Inspection tool for checking technical errors. Quality requirements still need a content review.

FAQ

Can a company be an article's author?

Yes. Google's Article documentation specifies Organization for an organizational author and Person for an individual. Choose the type that matches the credited author.

Does knowsAbout certify expertise?

Schema.org's knowsAbout definition describes a topic a person knows about and explicitly treats expertise as a possibility. The property assigns no skill level.

Should the markup include information absent from the biography?

Google's structured data policies require visible supporting content and prohibit misleading representations of identity or affiliation. Keep the author description consistent with what readers can see.

Sources

Check how a page reads to answer engines. Open the GEO score analyzer