Structured data that helps Google understand article metadata including author, publish date, and headline for better search presentation.
Article Schema is a type of structured data markup that provides search engines with detailed information about news articles, blog posts, and other written content. This Schema.org markup includes essential metadata like headlines, authors, publication dates, publisher information, and article body content, enabling search engines to better understand and display your content in search results.
Article Schema plays a crucial role in modern SEO by helping search engines categorize and present content more effectively. When properly implemented, it can enhance your content's visibility through rich snippets, knowledge panels, and other SERP features that make your articles stand out from standard blue links.
Why It Matters for AI SEO
AI-powered search systems like Google's BERT and MUM rely heavily on structured data to understand content context and relationships. Article Schema provides these AI systems with explicit signals about your content's nature, credibility, and freshness. This structured information becomes particularly valuable as search engines increasingly use AI to match user intent with relevant content. Google's AI Overviews and other generative search features often pull information from well-marked articles, making proper schema implementation essential for content visibility in AI-generated responses. When your articles include comprehensive schema markup, AI systems can more accurately assess content quality, authorship, and topical relevance.
How It Works
Article Schema uses JSON-LD format to define key properties like headline, datePublished, author, publisher, and mainEntityOfPage. A complete implementation includes the article's full text, word count, and associated images with proper metadata. Tools like Schema Pro and WordLift can automate much of this process, while Google's Rich Results Test validates your markup. The markup should be placed in your page's head section or as a script tag in the body. Essential properties include the article headline, author information with proper Person or Organization markup, publisher details, publication and modification dates, and a clear article body. For news articles, additional properties like articleSection and keywords become important for categorization.
Common Mistakes
Many sites implement incomplete Article Schema, missing critical properties like author information or publication dates that reduce the markup's effectiveness. Another frequent error is using generic "website" markup instead of specific "NewsArticle" or "BlogPosting" types that provide more targeted signals to search engines. Inconsistent date formats and missing image metadata also prevent full schema benefits, limiting rich snippet eligibility and AI system understanding.