This translation has not been editorially reviewed yet. The German version is authoritative. Deutsche Fassung

GEO / AI

Why should your website name an author or publisher?

An author or publisher attribution shows machines and people who's responsible for your website's content, and thereby strengthens the page's credibility. Answer engines like ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews also select their sources based on whether an identifiable person or organisation stands behind them. Our check therefore looks for a machine-readable attribution of the author or publisher in the page code.

Machines assess sources by trust

Search engines and AI programs face the same question as your customers: who can I trust? Google describes its own assessment criteria with the acronym E-E-A-T, which stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. A key signal for that is the answer to who wrote the content. A page that names its author or publisher is verifiable: you can check whether the person or company exists and whether they know the subject. Anonymous text offers no such anchor. Answer engines therefore prefer to cite sources with an identifiable sender, the same way a newspaper would rather cite a named source than an anonymous letter.

How to record the author in a machine-readable way

Our check recognises three routes. First, the author meta tag in the page head, an invisible meta field with the writer's name. Second, a link marked as an author link, to a team or profile page, say. Third, an author field in the structured data, the page's invisible data sheet. Any one of these routes is enough for full marks. For company websites, this doesn't have to be an individual: the company itself can be entered as the publisher. It's worth pairing the attribution with a visible counterpart, a team page or a line reading "Responsible for this content", say — that way the signal for machines matches what visitors see.

Ask your agency to add the author meta tag or an author field in the structured data.
For company pages, enter the company as the publisher; for technical articles, enter the person who wrote it.
Create a team or about-us page that author attributions can link to.
For guide articles, visibly state who wrote the text and what experience that person brings.
Keep the attribution up to date when responsibilities change.

Deutsche Fassung dieser Seite

FAQ

What does E-E-A-T mean?

E-E-A-T is a set of assessment criteria from Google and stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Google uses these criteria to gauge the quality of content and its authors. AI answer engines draw on similar trust signals too. A clear author or publisher attribution is one of the simplest signals you can influence yourself.

Does every page need an author?

A machine-readable attribution on every page is the goal, since our check assesses every page individually. In practice, your agency sets this up once, centrally: the company is entered as the publisher in the structured data of every page, and for articles, the writing person is added on top. After that, the attribution runs automatically.

Is the company enough as the author, or does it need to be a person?

For our check, the publisher — your company — is enough. For impact on readers and machines, a named person is stronger for technical articles, ideally with a short introduction on a team page. A guide comes across as more credible when it's clearly written by an experienced specialist rather than an anonymous editorial team.