Article Schema Generator

As of October 2026, Google’s Article documentation has no required properties. It asks you to add the ones that apply to your content and recommends five: author (with a name, a type and a url to a profile), datePublished, dateModified, headline and image. With them, Google can show better title text, images and dates for the article in Search, in Google News and on its other surfaces. It may still choose not to.

There is no Article report in Search Console, and URL Inspection doesn’t list Article among a page’s enhancements. The Rich Results Test does detect Article items, so that is where you check them. Top stories and Google News don’t require the markup either; they depend on Google’s news policies and the content.

So the payoff is quieter than a review star or a price in the results. Good Article markup removes ambiguity: which date is the publish date, who wrote the piece, which image represents it. Wrong markup does the reverse: an old article shown with a new date, the wrong author, or your logo used as the article image.

The generator offers the three types Google’s Article documentation uses in its examples. Google’s Article documentation accepts all three and lists the same properties for each, so the choice describes the page; it doesn’t unlock anything.

Don’t pick NewsArticle to look newsworthy. An evergreen tutorial marked as news is simply mislabelled. If you run Rank Math with its News Sitemap, note that Rank Math switches posts included in that sitemap to NewsArticle on its own, whatever the Article Type setting says.

Every text field is trimmed. Description, publisher, modified date, images, section and keywords are left out when blank. Headline, author name, article URL and published date are always printed, even when blank, so fill all four in. The form starts with sample values, including an example.com URL, a sample author and a sample publisher; replace every one.

The output is valid as it stands, but it stops short of Google’s recommendations in a few places, and some sites need more. Work through this list for the page you are marking up.

Publisher isn’t among the properties Google’s Article documentation recommends. It is valid schema.org and does no harm, which is why the generator keeps it, but don’t spend time on a publisher logo for Google’s sake.

Dates cause more Article problems than any other field, because WordPress, the theme and the markup can each show a different one. Google’s guidance on byline dates comes down to this: show a clear date on the page, label it Published or Updated when you show both, use the same dates in datePublished and dateModified, and get the time zone right.

Change dateModified when the content changes in a way a reader would care about: a new section, corrected facts, updated prices. Don’t change it for a typo fix or a new internal link to make the post look fresh. Some themes and plugins show the modified date after any save at all; if yours does, the page will claim an update the reader can’t find.

datePublished never moves. If you rewrite an old post, keep its original publish date and add an updated date, or publish the rewrite as a new article on a new URL. A post that says Published October 2026 for content first published in 2021 misleads readers and gains nothing.

Google’s author best practices are short. Include every author. Put only the person’s name in the name field: no "Posted by", no job title, no "and" joining two names. Use Person for people and Organization for companies. Point url, or sameAs, at a page that is about that person.

In WordPress the obvious url is the author archive that core creates at /author/username/, as long as your theme shows a bio there. If you turned author archives off in Yoast SEO or Rank Math to avoid thin pages, those URLs now redirect, so link to an about-the-team page with a section for that person instead, or leave url out. Never point it at a URL that redirects to the home page.

Check the WordPress user, too. Posts published under a shared admin account give every article the same author, often literally named admin. Assign each post to the person who wrote it and give that user a real display name, because SEO plugins build their author markup from that user.

Most WordPress posts already have Article markup before you open this generator. Check the live page before adding anything.

Yoast SEO prints Article markup on posts by default, as part of one connected graph with the WebPage, the author as a Person, and the Organization or Person you set under Site representation. Change the default for all posts under Yoast SEO, Settings, Content types, Posts. Change a single post in the Schema tab of the Yoast sidebar, where Article type offers Article, Blog post, News article and several narrower types.

Rank Math uses Article for posts by default too. The site-wide setting is under Rank Math SEO, Titles & Meta, Posts: Schema Type is Article, and Article Type chooses Article, Blog Post or News Article. For one post, open the Schema tab in Rank Math’s sidebar.

SEOPress handles Article markup in SEOPress PRO, through Structured Data Types: per post in the Structured Data Types metabox, or for a whole post type under SEO, Schemas.

Themes are a fourth source. Some add microdata to their post templates, with itemscope and itemtype attributes that describe the post as a BlogPosting or Article. The Schema Markup Validator at validator.schema.org lists microdata and JSON-LD items side by side, so a theme’s item shows up next to your plugin’s.

If an SEO plugin already prints Article markup for the post, don’t paste a second block. Two Article items with different authors, dates or images leave Google to pick, and you don’t control which. Fix the plugin’s inputs instead: the author’s profile, the featured image, the visible dates, the Article type setting.

The generator is the right tool when nothing else describes the page: a site with no SEO plugin, a landing page your SEO plugin marks up as a plain WebPage, a static HTML section, or a custom post type your plugin skips. It also works as a reference: fill it in with what the post should say, then compare that with what the Rich Results Test finds on the live URL.

If you do paste it, put it in a Custom HTML block on that post, or in a head snippet limited to that URL. Enter the post’s canonical URL in the Article URL field, because mainEntityOfPage ties the markup to that address.

To do this across a whole site, RankHive finds posts with real Search Console impressions that have no structured data, drafts the block, and after you approve it, its WordPress plugin prints it in that post’s head. That block sits beside your SEO plugin’s graph, not inside it, so test the first one for a duplicate Article.

An illustrative case. A gardening site on Rank Math has a 2025 post, "How to winterize a sprinkler system", rewritten in September 2026. The editor changed the visible date to the rewrite date and, unsure whether Rank Math covered the post, pasted Article markup from this generator into it.

The Rich Results Test now shows two Article items. Rank Math’s is a BlogPosting with the March 2025 publish date and the September 2026 modified date, which is right. The pasted one is an Article with September 2026 as the publish date and the generator’s sample author still in it.

Deleting the pasted block and restoring both visible dates fixed both problems. The generator was still useful: filled in correctly, its output was the checklist for what Rank Math’s item should contain.

Because Search Console has no Article report, the Rich Results Test is your monitoring. Run it after you publish, and again after any theme or SEO plugin change, since those are what usually break Article markup.

Most Article faults trace back to dates, duplicate sources or images. Start from what you see.