Article Schema (JSON-LD)

Structured data is how a machine knows what a page is, not just what words it contains. Article schema in JSON-LD explicitly labels a page as an article and attaches the metadata AI systems lean on when deciding whether to trust and attribute it: headline, author, publish and modified dates, publisher, and the canonical URL. Without it, an AI has to infer all of that from raw HTML — and inference is where attribution gets lost, dates get guessed wrong, and the wrong entity gets credit. With clean Article schema, the page hands the model an unambiguous, machine-readable summary of its own provenance. This matters for citation in two ways. First, freshness: AI systems increasingly prefer recently updated sources, and an explicit dateModified is the clearest freshness signal you can send. Second, authorship and E-E-A-T: a named author linked to a real Person entity is one of the strongest trust signals a page can carry, and Article schema is where that link lives. JSON-LD is the format every major AI platform and search engine reads most reliably, and it sits in the page head without touching your visible design — making Article schema one of the highest-leverage, lowest-risk Understanding-layer factors. Because the markup is invisible to readers and cheap to template once, it is one of the few factors you can roll out across an entire site in an afternoon and then benefit from indefinitely.

• A JSON-LD Article block in the page head with headline, author, datePublished, dateModified, and publisher fields populated.
• An author property linked by sameAs to the writer's real Person entity, LinkedIn, and other authoritative profiles.
• A dateModified value kept genuinely current so AI systems reading freshness signals treat the page as up to date.

• Hardcoding dateModified to the original publish date so the freshness signal never actually updates.
• Authoring as the Organization with no named Person, forfeiting the strongest E-E-A-T attribution signal.

Does Article schema change how my page looks?

No. JSON-LD lives in the page head and is invisible to human visitors; it only adds a machine-readable description of the page for AI systems and search engines.

Which matters more, datePublished or dateModified?

Both help, but dateModified is the clearest freshness signal — AI systems increasingly prefer recently updated sources, so keep it genuinely accurate rather than hardcoded.

Sources

• Article structured data documentation — Google Search Central
• Schema.org Article type — Schema.org

• AI Crawler Access
• llms.txt Presence