Opens in a new tabSkip to content
Agent LighthouseAgent Lighthouse

    Searches the text of every published page. The evidence sources themselves are not in this index — search all of them on the trusted sources page.

    GitHub ↗
    Browse checks and page contents
    answer-readiness/meta-author

    Meta author present

    What it checks

    AI agents use the meta author tag to attribute content to a specific person or organization for E-E-A-T scoring. Without it, your content appears authorless, which reduces trust signals in AI ranking systems that prioritize named expertise.

    Why it matters

    A named ranking or answer system reads <meta name="author"> and uses it to attribute the page to a person or organization, raising the page’s trust/authority weighting relative to an otherwise identical page without the tag.

    Evidence

    • WHATWG HTML defines author as a standard metadata name: “The value must be a free-form string giving the name of one of the page’s authors.” The spec assigns no consumer behavior to it — html.spec.whatwg.org/…/semantics.html (verified 2026-08-21)
    • Convention is real but consumer-less: the tag predates and is superseded by schema.org author, which is the form Google documents for authorship — developers.google.com/…/article (verified 2026-08-21)

    Limits

    Google’s list of meta tags Google Search supports does not include author, and the same page states “Google will ignore meta tags that it doesn’t support” — developers.google.com/…/special-tags (verified 2026-08-21). Google’s Article structured-data guidance handles authorship exclusively through schema.org (author.name, author.url, Person/Organization) and never mentions the meta tag — developers.google.com/…/article (verified 2026-08-21). OpenAI’s crawler documentation mentions no HTML metadata of any kind — developers.openai.com/…/bots (verified 2026-08-21). The audit’s “E-E-A-T scoring” framing is therefore D-grade on its own terms.

    No shipping AI system is documented to derive a trust signal from this tag. And the page it is currently measured on — the homepage, per the wrong-page bug above — would not carry a byline even on a site that marks up authorship correctly.

    How it scores

    author is a WHATWG-standard metadata name with long-standing partial adoption, but no vendor documents any system reading it, and the specific E-E-A-T mechanism this audit asserts is contradicted by the one vendor that documents authorship handling.

    Sources