Author markup with sameAs: Crawl Audit check 24

Short answer: author markup says who wrote a page, and links that person to a page that identifies them: an author page on your site, or their profiles elsewhere. Google says it uses either the author's url or sameAs links to tell authors with the same name apart. Crawl Audit check 24 passes when the page has a Person node with sameAs links, and only expects one on article-style pages.

What Crawl Audit checks

• Pass: the page has a Person node with a sameAs property.
• Warning: no such node, and the page looks like an article: it has an <article> element, a <time> element or datetime attribute, or a URL with /blog/, /post/, /article/ or /news/.
• Pass: not an article page, so no author markup is needed.

Note the difference from Google: Crawl Audit asks specifically for sameAs, while Google accepts url or sameAs. Including both satisfies everyone.

What Google says

In Google's Article documentation, author.url is "A link to a web page that uniquely identifies the author", and "You can use the sameAs property as an alternative. Google can understand both sameAs and url when disambiguating authors." Google adds that it "strongly" recommends using the author's type and url (or sameAs), and listing each author separately.

schema.org defines sameAs as the "URL of a reference Web page that unambiguously indicates the item's identity", such as a Wikipedia page, a Wikidata entry or an official website.

"author": {
  "@type": "Person",
  "name": "Jane Doe",
  "url": "https://example.com/team/jane-doe",
  "sameAs": [
    "https://www.linkedin.com/in/janedoe",
    "https://github.com/janedoe"
  ]
}

On this site the author of this page is a reference, {"@id": "https://devmarde.com/team/zain-kazmi#person"}, to one Person node that's defined once in our code, with the profile page /team/zain-kazmi as its URL and a sameAs link to Zain's GitHub. Every article uses the same reference, so the author is described the same way everywhere.

What makes an author page worth linking to

• A real name, a role and a few sentences on what the person actually does.
• Links to profiles that exist and belong to them. A profile someone else controls does more harm than no link.
• A list of what they've written on the site.

How to set it up on your platform

• WordPress: fill in each author's bio under Users › Profile › About Yourself. WordPress shows it in the Post Author Biography block, and Yoast uses it for its Person markup, which Yoast says is "most commonly used to identify the author of a piece of content". Author archive pages come from the theme's author.php template.
• Shopify, Wix and Squarespace: blog posts carry an author name automatically. For profile links in the markup, add a short author section to the post and, where the platform allows custom markup, a Person node with sameAs.
• Next.js: keep authors in one data file and generate both the author page and the article markup from it.

Common mistakes

• The company as the author of everything. If a person wrote it, name the person.
• sameAs links to a search result or a homepage, instead of a page about that person.
• Different spellings of the author's name on different pages.

Sources

• Google Search Central, Article structured data (updated 8 September 2026), checked 3 October 2026.
• schema.org, sameAs.
• WordPress, Post Author Biography block and Template hierarchy; Yoast, Person piece.