Search Console

Article (Article, NewsArticle, BlogPosting) structured data

Adding Article structured data to your news, blog, and sports article pages 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). While there's no markup requirement to be eligible for Google News features like Top stories, you can add Article to more explicitly tell Google what your content is about (for example, that it's a news article, who the author is, or what the title of the article is).

Article rich result

Example

Here's an example of a page with Article structured data.

JSON-LD


<html>
  <head>
    <title>Title of a News Article</title>
    <script type="application/ld+json">
    {
      "@context": "https://schema.org",
      "@type": "NewsArticle",
      "headline": "Title of a News Article",
      "image": [
        "https://example.com/photos/1x1/photo.jpg",
        "https://example.com/photos/4x3/photo.jpg",
        "https://example.com/photos/16x9/photo.jpg"
       ],
      "datePublished": "2024-01-05T08:00:00+08:00",
      "dateModified": "2024-02-05T09:20:00+08:00",
      "author": [{
          "@type": "Person",
          "name": "Jane Doe",
          "url": "https://example.com/profile/janedoe123"
        },{
          "@type": "Person",
          "name": "John Doe",
          "url": "https://example.com/profile/johndoe123"
      }]
    }
    </script>
  </head>
  <body>
  </body>
</html>

Microdata


<html>
  <head>
    <title>Title of a News Article</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <div itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/NewsArticle">
      <div itemprop="headline">Title of News Article</div>
      <meta itemprop="image" content="https://example.com/photos/1x1/photo.jpg" />
      <meta itemprop="image" content="https://example.com/photos/4x3/photo.jpg" />
      <img itemprop="image" src="https://example.com/photos/16x9/photo.jpg" />
      <div>
        <span itemprop="datePublished" content="2024-01-05T08:00:00+08:00">
          January 5, 2024 at 8:00am
        </span>
        (last modified
        <span itemprop="dateModified" content="2024-02-05T09:20:00+08:00">
          February 5, 2024 at 9:20am
        </span>
        )
      </div>
      <div>
        by
        <span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person">
          <a itemprop="url" href="https://example.com/profile/janedoe123">
            <span itemprop="name">Jane Doe</span>
          </a>
        </span>
        and
        <span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person">
          <a itemprop="url" href="https://example.com/profile/johndoe123">
            <span itemprop="name">John Doe</span>
          </a>
        </span>
      </div>
    </div>
  </body>
</html>

How to add structured data

Structured data is a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content. If you're new to structured data, you can learn more about how structured data works.

Here's an overview of how to build, test, and release structured data.

  1. Add as many recommended properties that apply to your web page. There are no required properties; instead, add the properties that apply to your content. Based on the format you're using, learn where to insert structured data on the page.
  2. Follow the guidelines.
  3. Validate your code using the Rich Results Test and fix any critical errors. Consider also fixing any non-critical issues that may be flagged in the tool, as they can help improve the quality of your structured data (however, this isn't necessary to be eligible for rich results).
  4. Deploy a few pages that include your structured data and use the URL Inspection tool to test how Google sees the page. Be sure that your page is accessible to Google and not blocked by a robots.txt file, the noindex tag, or login requirements. If the page looks okay, you can ask Google to recrawl your URLs.
  5. To keep Google informed of future changes, we recommend that you submit a sitemap. You can automate this with the Search Console Sitemap API.

Guidelines

You must follow these guidelines to enable structured data to be eligible for inclusion in Google Search results.

Technical guidelines

Structured data type definitions

To help Google better understand your page, include as many recommended properties that apply to your web page. There are no required properties; instead, add the properties that apply to your content.

Article objects

Article objects must be based on one of the following schema.org types: Article, NewsArticle, BlogPosting.

The Google-supported properties are the following:

Recommended properties author

Person or Organization

The author of the article. To help Google best understand authors across various features, we recommend following the author markup best practices.

author.name

Text

The name of the author.

author.url

URL

A link to a web page that uniquely identifies the author of the article. For example, the author's social media page, an "about me" page, or a bio page.

If the URL is an internal profile page, we recommend marking up that author using profile page structured data.

dateModified

DateTime

The date and time the article was most recently modified, in ISO 8601 format. We recommend that you provide timezone information; otherwise, we will default to the timezone used by Googlebot.

Add the dateModified property if you want to provide more accurate date information to Google. The Rich Results Test doesn't show a warning for this property, as it's only recommended if you decide that it's applicable to your site. datePublished

DateTime

The date and time the article was first published, in ISO 8601 format. We recommend that you provide timezone information; otherwise, we will default to the timezone used by Googlebot.

Add the datePublished property if you want to provide more accurate date information to Google. The Rich Results Test doesn't show a warning for this property, as it's only recommended if you decide that it's applicable to your site.

headline

Text

The title of the article. Consider using a concise title, as long titles may be truncated on some devices.

image

Repeated ImageObject or URL

The URL to an image that is representative of the article. Use images that are relevant to the article, rather than logos or captions.

Additional image guidelines:

For example:

"image": [
  "https://example.com/photos/1x1/photo.jpg",
  "https://example.com/photos/4x3/photo.jpg",
  "https://example.com/photos/16x9/photo.jpg"
]

Author markup best practices

To help Google best understand and represent the author of the content, we recommend following these best practices when specifying authors in markup:

Best practices for author markup

Include all authors in the markup

Make sure that all the authors that are presented as authors on the web page are also included in markup.

Specifying multiple authors

When specifying multiple authors, list each author in their own author field: 

"author": [
  {"name": "Willow Lane"},
  {"name": "Regula Felix"}
]

Don't merge multiple authors in the same author field: 

"author": {
  "name": "Willow Lane, Regula Felix"
}

Use additional fields

To help Google better understand who the author is, we strongly recommend using the type and url (or sameAs) properties. Use valid URLs for the url or sameAs properties.

For example, if the author is a person, you could link to an author's page that provides more information about the author: 

"author": [
  {
    "@type": "Person",
    "name": "Willow Lane",
    "url": "https://www.example.com/staff/willow_lane"
  }
]

If the author is an organization, you could link to the organization's home page. 

"author":
  [
    {
      "@type":"Organization",
      "name": "Some News Agency",
      "url": "https://www.example.com/"
  }
]

Only specify the author's name in the author.name property

In the author.name property, only specify the name of the author. Don't add any other piece of information. More specifically, don't add the following information:

  • The name of the publisher. Instead, use the publisher property.
  • The author's job title. Instead, use the appropriate property if you want to specify that information (jobTitle).
  • Honorific prefix or suffix. Instead, use the appropriate property if you want to specify that information (honorificPrefix or honorificSuffix).
  • Introductory words (for example, don't include words like "posted by").
"author":
  [
    {
      "@type": "Person",
      "name": "Echidna Jones",
      "honorificPrefix": "Dr",
      "jobTitle": "Editor in Chief"
    }
  ],
"publisher":
  [
    {
      "@type": "Organization",
      "name": "Bugs Daily"
    }
  ]
}

Use the appropriate Type

Use the Person type for people, and the Organization type for organizations. Don't use the Thing type, and don't use the wrong type (for example, using the Organization type for a person).

Here's an example that applies the author markup best practices: 

"author":
  [
    {
      "@type": "Person",
      "name": "Willow Lane",
      "jobTitle": "Journalist",
      "url": "https://www.example.com/staff/willow-lane"
    },
    {
      "@type": "Person",
      "name": "Echidna Jones",
      "jobTitle": "Editor in Chief",
      "url": "https://www.example.com/staff/echidna-jones"
    }
  ],
"publisher":
  {
    "@type": "Organization",
    "name": "The Daily Bug",
    "url": "https://www.example.com"
  },
  // + Other fields related to the article...
}

Troubleshooting

If you're having trouble implementing or debugging structured data, here are some resources that may help you.