What is Article schema?

Article schema, explained

Google's Article documentation says adding the markup helps Google understand the page and show better title text, images and date information in Search and other Google surfaces. It supports three types: Article, NewsArticle and BlogPosting. There are no required properties; you add the ones that apply.

The recommended properties are headline, image (Google suggests providing several aspect ratios: 16×9, 4×3 and 1×1), datePublished and dateModified in ISO 8601 format, and author with name and a url that identifies the author, such as an author page or profile. Google's author guidance is specific: list every author shown on the page as a separate author, use Person or Organization, and put only the name in author.name, not job titles or the publisher's name.

Dates deserve care. dateModified should change when the content meaningfully changes, and it should match the updated date shown on the page and the lastmod in your sitemap. Bumping it without real changes to look fresh undermines trust in all three.

Article markup won't make a post rank by itself. What it does is remove ambiguity about who wrote the page, when, and which image represents it, which is exactly the kind of information Google and other systems use when deciding how to present and attribute content.

Why it matters for founders

If you publish a blog, Article markup makes dates and authorship explicit, which helps your results show accurate dates and names.

Example

Each blog post outputs BlogPosting JSON-LD with its headline, hero images in three ratios, datePublished, dateModified from frontmatter, and an author with a link to their profile.

Common mistakes

• Updating dateModified without changing the content.
• Putting job titles or the company name in author.name.
• Dates in markup that differ from those on the page.
• No author URL, leaving authorship ambiguous.