Article schema markup generator

Article markup helps Google understand what a page is and who wrote it. It does not, by itself, produce a distinct rich result on ordinary Search, and any page telling you otherwise is describing something the documentation does not claim.

Meeting a feature’s documented requirements does not guarantee that the feature appears. No tool can promise that, and any that does is describing something it cannot know.

What Article markup is for

Article is documented as helping Google understand the page rather than as producing a visual enhancement in the way that a product snippet or a review star rating does. That is a less exciting claim than most guides make, and it is the accurate one. The value is in being explicit about authorship, publication date and publisher, which are the things a consumer would otherwise have to infer from a template.

This matters more than it used to. Authorship signals are read by more than one kind of consumer now, and an article whose author is a nested Person node with a URL is legible in a way that "by Jane Doe" in a div is not. The markup does not make the author authoritative; it makes the claim machine-readable.

If you want a visible enhancement from an article page, the realistic candidates are breadcrumbs, which do appear in results and are genuinely easy to add, and — where the page qualifies — video or FAQ-adjacent features. Article markup is worth having, but expect it to work quietly.

Article, NewsArticle or BlogPosting

These three are treated equivalently for the Article feature, which means the choice matters less than the amount of argument it generates. NewsArticle describes journalism produced by a news organisation. BlogPosting describes a blog post. Article covers everything else, and is the safe answer when the page is none of the above or somewhere between them.

We deliberately do not tell you that your Article "should be" a NewsArticle. Separating news from editorial, opinion, press release, corporate blog and content marketing is a judgement about what the publication is, and no engine can make it reliably from the page. When our audit spots signals pointing at a subtype, it says so as something to review, with the signals shown, and leaves the decision with you.

What is not a judgement call: if you are not a news publisher, NewsArticle is not a way to become one. Marking marketing content as NewsArticle describes it wrongly, and the description is the entire point of the markup.

The author property does more work as a node

author accepts a bare string, and a bare string is the most common way it is written. A nested Person node with a name and a url is substantially more useful, because it distinguishes the author from a coincidentally similar name elsewhere and points at somewhere the author can be understood.

Where an article has several authors, use an array of Person nodes rather than one string containing both names joined by "and". Where the author is the publication itself, an Organization node is correct and honest. Where the byline is a pen name or a desk, mark up what the page actually says rather than a legal name the page never shows — the markup describes the page.

The author name in the markup should match the byline a visitor reads. Our audit compares them and, when they differ only slightly — "Dr. John Smith" in the markup against "Written by John Smith" on the page — reports it as a possible match for you to confirm rather than as an error. Honorifics and name particles are used to compute that similarity and are never stripped to declare two names identical, because "Al-Rashid" and "Rashid" may be different people.

Headlines and dates

headline should be the article title as the visitor sees it. It is not a place for a longer, more descriptive, more keyword-dense variant — that is a mismatch between markup and page, and long headlines are truncated on display anyway.

datePublished and dateModified are both recommended, and both should be ISO 8601 with a time zone offset. The pattern to avoid is a dateModified that updates on every deployment because it is wired to the file timestamp rather than to an actual edit. A modification date that moves without the content changing describes something untrue, and it is the kind of thing that gets noticed at scale rather than on one page.

If the article was substantially rewritten, say so with dateModified and consider whether datePublished should stay where it is. If it received a typo fix, leaving dateModified alone is the more accurate answer.

Mistakes worth avoiding

Check what you already have

If the page you are marking up already carries structured data, audit it before adding more. Duplicate entities from a theme and a plugin are the most common finding on established sites, and adding a third block makes it worse rather than better.

Check a page