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Author Schema: Person and ProfilePage Markup

By Anthony Limpert, founder of Clickflame since 2004
Published October 30, 2026

What Author Schema Does

Structured data tells search engines in plain code who wrote the page. Google says it uses author markup to understand authors. It does not say markup lifts rankings, and schema on a fake person fixes nothing.

What it does well: it connects a post to a person and that person to their proof. Our free audit checks for it because many sites we scan either have none or have a plugin default that names Admin.

Person Markup on Every Post

This goes in the head of each post. Swap in your own details.

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "BlogPosting",
  "headline": "How to Tell If Your Brakes Need Replacing",
  "datePublished": "2026-10-30",
  "dateModified": "2026-10-30",
  "author": {
    "@type": "Person",
    "name": "Jane Rivera",
    "jobTitle": "Master Mechanic",
    "url": "https://example.com/authors/jane-rivera/"
  },
  "publisher": {
    "@type": "Organization",
    "name": "Example Auto Repair",
    "url": "https://example.com/"
  }
}
</script>

Google's Article docs set a few rules:

• Use Person for people and Organization for organizations.
• Only the name goes in author.name. No job title, no Dr. or Esq., no posted by, no publisher name. Use jobTitle and honorificPrefix for those.
• The author url should go to a page that uniquely identifies the author. Their author page is the right target.
• More than one author means more than one Person entry. Never two names in one field.

ProfilePage Markup on the Author Page

Google's ProfilePage docs cover pages where a creator shares first-hand perspective, and author pages are one of the named uses. mainEntity and name are required, and the page must be mainly about that one person.

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "ProfilePage",
  "dateModified": "2026-10-30",
  "mainEntity": {
    "@type": "Person",
    "name": "Jane Rivera",
    "jobTitle": "Master Mechanic",
    "image": "https://example.com/img/jane-rivera.jpg",
    "worksFor": {"@type": "AutoRepair", "name": "Example Auto Repair"},
    "hasCredential": {
      "@type": "EducationalOccupationalCredential",
      "name": "ASE Master Automobile Technician"
    },
    "knowsAbout": ["Brakes", "Suspension", "Hybrid vehicles"],
    "sameAs": [
      "https://www.linkedin.com/in/example",
      "https://www.youtube.com/@example"
    ]
  }
}
</script>

Keep every fact in the markup visible on the page too. Markup that claims what the page does not show is the wrong kind of shortcut.

sameAs: Linking the Person to Their Proof

sameAs lists other pages that are the same person. Good targets, best first:

1. State license lookup or board listing.
2. LinkedIn profile.
3. Their own business website about page.
4. YouTube channel or podcast page with their name.
5. Articles they wrote for other publishers.

Every link has to be real and match the person. A sameAs link to somebody else with the same name is worse than none.

Marking Up an Expert Reviewer

When an expert checked a post but did not write it, keep the writer in author and add the expert as a reviewer. Schema.org has a reviewedBy property for web pages.

"author": {"@type": "Person", "name": "Jane Rivera", "url": "https://example.com/authors/jane-rivera/"},
"reviewedBy": {"@type": "Person", "name": "Dr. Sam Lee", "url": "https://example.com/authors/sam-lee/"}

Google's Article docs do not list reviewedBy, so treat it as extra detail, not a rich result trigger. The visible reviewed by line on the page matters more. See our expert review guide.

Mistakes We See in Audits

• Plugin default author named admin or the site name.
• Job title stuffed into the name field.
• Author url pointing to the home page.
• Two different spellings of the same author across posts.
• Person schema on the post but no author page to back it up.
• sameAs links to profiles that do not exist anymore.

Test any page with Google's Rich Results Test and Schema.org's validator, then run our free audit to see the author signals together.

Questions People Ask