Author attribution: schema, rel=author and visible bylines

What author attribution is

Author attribution is naming who wrote a page and making that machine-readable. It can appear as a Person in the page’s structured data, as a link with rel="author", as the Open Graph article:author meta tag, or as a visible byline in the markup.

It matters most where the reader is deciding whether to trust the content. Google’s guidance on helpful content asks who wrote this and what makes them qualified, and for topics touching health, finance or safety, that question carries more weight than anywhere else.

What squirrel checks

The rule runs on every crawled page and emits one check per signal it finds, plus a fallback:

• author-schema passes when a JSON-LD block contains "author". Message: Author schema markup present, with the author name when one can be pulled out of the text.
• author-links passes when the page has any a[rel="author"]. Message: 2 author link(s) found, with the first link’s text.
• og-author passes when article:author is present. Message: Open Graph author meta present, with its content.
• visible-author reports info when the page matches [class*="author"], [class*="byline"], [rel="author"] but has no author schema and no author link. The rel half of that selector matches any element, not only anchors. Message: Author element found but no structured data, with Consider adding author schema markup as the value.
• author-info reports info when none of the four were found. Message: No author information detected, with Consider adding author attribution for E-E-A-T as the value.

The schema test is a substring match over the script text rather than a parse, and the name is extracted with a regular expression, so a deeply nested author object may be detected without a name. Severity info, weight 3.

How to fix it

<a rel="author" href="/authors/jane-diaz">Jane Diaz</a>

Show the author’s name where a reader will see it, link it to a bio page that says what they know about the subject, and mirror the same name in a Person node in the page’s structured data.

A byline with no link and no bio is weaker than none at all on a topic where expertise matters, because it raises the question without answering it.

Enable / disable

Disable this rule

[rules]
disable = ["content/author-info"]

Disable all Content rules

[rules]
disable = ["content/*"]

Enable only this rule

[rules]
enable = ["content/author-info"]

enable replaces the default ["*"], so this is the only rule selected. Leave disable out: a rule that matches any disable pattern is skipped even when enable names it. Only an enabled setting under a rule’s own [rule_options] table overrides both lists.

Related rules

• eeat/author-byline: the same signal judged as a trust requirement.
• eeat/author-expertise: author pages and Person schema as expertise indicators.
• schema/article: the structured data the author node belongs in.
• eeat/ymyl-detection: the topics where this matters most.

Content findings ship in every audit next to the SEO, performance and agent experience rules. See Fix SEO issues with AI for how an agent works through a report.

References

• Creating helpful, reliable content, Google Search Central
• Article structured data, Google Search Central

Check your site

Run squirrel audit https://example.com and open the Content section of the report. Each page is listed with the author signals it carries. Signed-out local audits need no account and cost nothing. Signed-in audits spend credits.