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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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    Browse checks and page contents
    structured-data/author-schema

    Author schema with credentials

    What it checks

    AI systems assign higher confidence to content from named experts with verifiable credentials. Person schema with jobTitle, sameAs, and affiliation lets AI agents cross-reference author identity across platforms, boosting your content in RAG trust scoring.

    Why it matters

    A Person author node can carry jobTitle, sameAs and affiliation. The claim is that a named AI system reads it, cross-references the author across platforms, and raises the retrieval and citation weight of the page relative to the same page marked up with name alone.

    Evidence

    • Google’s Article structured data doc lists author as recommended, not required: “The author of the article. To help Google best understand authors across various features, we recommend following the author markup best practices.” — developers.google.com/…/article (verified 2026-08-21)
    • Author markup best practices ask for the Person type for people and Organization for organizations (“Don’t use the Thing type”). “Google can understand both sameAs and url when disambiguating authors”, and jobTitle is offered only as “the appropriate property if you want to specify that information”. The stated purpose is to “best understand and represent the author of the content”, with no ranking or trust claim — developers.google.com/…/article (verified 2026-08-21)
    • schema.org defines name, jobTitle, affiliation and sameAs on Person but marks none of them required; affiliation is “An organization that this person is affiliated with” — schema.org/Person (verified 2026-08-21)
    • Structured data of any kind is present on 41% of pages as JSON-LD, up from 34% in 2022. But Person does not appear among the leading emitted types: WebSite 12.73%, Organization 7.16%, BreadcrumbList 5.66%, LocalBusiness 3.97%, Product 0.77%. That is partial adoption at best — almanac.httparchive.org/…/structured-data (verified 2026-08-21)

    Limits

    Google states for its AI features: “You don’t need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in these features. There’s also no special schema.org structured data that you need to add” (developers.google.com/…/ai-features, verified 2026-08-21) — which directly contradicts the audit’s claim that author markup boosts “RAG trust scoring”. No vendor documentation was found in which any named AI agent (OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, Microsoft) reads author markup, and no source requires jobTitle or affiliation; the four-property pass gate is unsupported by any consumer.

    How it scores

    The only documented consumer is Google Search. It reads author.name plus url or sameAs to disambiguate an author, calls the whole property recommended rather than required, and never states an effect on ranking or trust scoring. No vendor documents jobTitle or affiliation being read at all, and the “RAG trust scoring” mechanism the audit asserts has no source.

    Sources