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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.

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    structured-data/article-schema

    Article schema

    What it checks

    AI agents extract Article schema to identify content freshness (datePublished/dateModified), authorship, and topic (headline). Without it, your blog content is treated as generic text with no provenance, reducing its chances of being cited in AI-generated answers.

    Why it matters

    Google Search parses Article/NewsArticle/BlogPosting markup and uses it to select the title text, image and date information shown for that page in Google Search and other Google properties (Google News, Assistant).

    Evidence

    • Google states the effect directly. Adding Article structured data “can help Google understand more about the web page and show better title text, images, and date information for the article in search results on Google Search and other properties (for example, Google News and the Google Assistant).” — developers.google.com/…/article (verified 2026-08-21)
    • Article remains a live feature in Google’s structured data gallery: “A news, sports, or blog article displayed in various rich result features.” — developers.google.com/…/search-gallery (verified 2026-08-21)
    • Adoption: Article found on 2.4M domains in the October 2024 Common Crawl; BlogPosting on 1.40% and Article on 0.18% of mobile pages — webdatacommons.org/…/stats.html and almanac.httparchive.org/…/structured-data (both verified 2026-08-21)

    Limits

    Google’s contract is far weaker than the audit’s required-property set: “There are no required properties; instead, add the properties that apply to your content”, and headline, datePublished, dateModified, author and image are all listed as recommended. Blocking a pass on a missing dateModified therefore has no basis in the documented consumer behavior. Google’s news features do not need the markup either — Top stories eligibility does not require Article structured data.

    The audit’s AI-attribution framing is separately disclaimed by Google: “There’s also no special schema.org structured data that you need to add” to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode — developers.google.com/…/ai-features (verified 2026-08-21). A matched difference-in-differences study over 1,885 pages adding JSON-LD found no AI-citation uplift — ahrefs.com/…/schema-ai-citations (verified 2026-08-21)

    How it scores

    A vendor doc names the consumer and states the behavior verbatim; the type is a live Google search feature with web-scale adoption.

    Sources