Article Schema

Article schema is structured data, usually written as JSON-LD, that describes a written page as an Article: its headline, who wrote it, when it was published and last changed, and which image stands for it. It tells a machine that the page is a piece of writing with an author and a date, rather than a product listing or a business profile.

What goes in it

The type is defined at schema.org/Article, with narrower forms such as NewsArticle and BlogPosting for pages that are one of those. Google’s Article structured data documentation lists no required properties for the type and recommends six: author (a Person or Organization, ideally with a name and a url that identifies the writer), datePublished and dateModified in ISO 8601 with a timezone, headline, and image. The headline should match the visible title. The dates should match the ones on the page.

What a machine does with it

A search engine may show the headline, date and image in a result. An AI assistant that fetches the page gets something plainer: a stated publication date it can use when the question is about what is current, and an author it can resolve to a person rather than infer from a byline. None of the assistants documents how it weighs Article markup. What is certain is that a page without it leaves both the date and the author to be guessed from the visible text, and a guess is what gets a page passed over when two sources say similar things.

The article is not the business

Article schema describes the writing. It says nothing about who the business is, where it is or what it does; that job belongs to LocalBusiness or Organization markup on the pages that describe the business. Across 9,483 small-business sites this site audited in September 2026, 17.8% carried no schema.org markup at all, and most of what the rest carried described the website (WebSite, WebPage, BreadcrumbList) rather than the business behind it. An Article block on a blog post does not fix that. The breakdown is in what 9,483 small business websites serve to an AI crawler.

A common question

Does adding Article schema to a blog post help an assistant identify the business?

No, those are two different jobs. Article markup describes the writing: a headline, an author, the dates it was published and last changed, and an image that stands for the page. Who the business is, where it sits and what it does belongs to LocalBusiness or Organization markup on the pages that describe the business. The gap is common: of 9,483 audited small-business sites, 17.8% carried no schema.org markup at all, and most of what the rest carried described the website rather than the company behind it.

Sources

Type definition: schema.org/Article. Recommended properties: Google’s Article structured data documentation. The 17.8% figure is this site’s own audit; sample drawn per metro and trade, not from a random frame.