Person Schema: Building Author Authority for AI Citations

You've written expert content. Your research is thorough. Your insights are original. But your author bio says "Marketing Team" with no photo and no credentials. When AI evaluates whether to cite you, it finds no evidence that a real, qualified person wrote this.

This authorship gap is why generic content rarely gets cited. AI platforms don't just evaluate content quality—they evaluate author credibility. Is this person real? What's their expertise? Can their credentials be verified across the web? Without Person schema, you're asking AI to trust anonymous content.

Person schema is how you prove authorship. It connects your content to a verifiable person with credentials AI can cross-reference and trust.

What Is Person Schema?

Person schema is structured data markup that identifies individuals—specifically content authors—with properties like name, job title, employer, education, social profiles, and expertise areas. It's the machine-readable version of an author bio.

According to Google's Article schema documentation, adding author information helps Google understand who created the content and what their qualifications are—a signal increasingly important as AI-generated content proliferates.

Why Authorship Matters to AI Engines

AI platforms face a fundamental problem: determining content trustworthiness at scale. With billions of pages to evaluate, verifiable authorship becomes a filtering mechanism. Content with structured, credentialed authors gets prioritized over anonymous content.

Research from Conductor shows that verified authorship, citations from credible studies, and visible credentials help AI distinguish trustworthy sources from generic content. Without structured Person data, your author is indistinguishable from AI-generated or low-quality content.

The E-E-A-T Connection

Google's E-E-A-T framework (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) has become even more critical with AI search. Person schema directly addresses three of the four dimensions.

How to Implement Person Schema

Person schema appears in two places: on the author's profile page (standalone) and nested within Article/BlogPosting schema on every piece of content they write.

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Person",
  "name": "Jane Smith",
  "url": "https://www.yoursite.com/author/jane-smith",
  "image": "https://www.yoursite.com/images/jane-smith.jpg",
  "jobTitle": "Senior SEO Strategist",
  "worksFor": {
    "@type": "Organization",
    "name": "Digital Marketing Agency"
  },
  "alumniOf": {
    "@type": "EducationalOrganization",
    "name": "University of Marketing"
  },
  "description": "Jane has 12 years of experience in technical SEO, specializing in enterprise-level optimizations. She's spoken at MozCon, BrightonSEO, and contributed to Search Engine Land.",
  "sameAs": [
    "https://www.linkedin.com/in/janesmith",
    "https://twitter.com/janesmith",
    "https://github.com/janesmith"
  ],
  "knowsAbout": ["SEO", "Technical SEO", "Content Strategy", "GEO"]
}
</script>

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Article",
  "headline": "How to Build Backlinks in 2025",
  "datePublished": "2025-12-16",
  "author": {
    "@type": "Person",
    "name": "Jane Smith",
    "url": "https://www.yoursite.com/author/jane-smith",
    "sameAs": [
      "https://www.linkedin.com/in/janesmith",
      "https://twitter.com/janesmith"
    ]
  },
  "publisher": {
    "@type": "Organization",
    "name": "Your Company",
    "logo": {
      "@type": "ImageObject",
      "url": "https://www.yoursite.com/logo.png"
    }
  }
}
</script>

Building Citation-Worthy Author Profiles

An author profile page isn't just a bio—it's the entity home for that person. AI platforms use it to verify credentials and assess expertise breadth.

According to Aubrey Yung's analysis, creating dedicated pages for each author with unique URLs and implementing Person markup ensures AI can distinguish between contributors and evaluate individual expertise independently.

Frequently Asked Questions