The Complete Guide to JSON-LD Structured Data for Articles
Emit one consolidated JSON-LD @graph per page containing your Organization, WebSite, Article, Person (author and reviewer), and BreadcrumbList entities, each with a stable @id, so search and AI systems can unambiguously resolve the relationships.
Key takeaways
- Should I use multiple JSON-LD scripts or one graph? — Prefer a single @graph. It lets you define shared entities like your Organization once and reference them
- What is reviewedBy and why does it matter? — reviewedBy links an article to the Person who fact-checked it. It is a strong E-E-A-T signal that both search engin
Structured data is how you hand a machine a clean, unambiguous summary of a page. Done right, it is the difference between being parsed correctly and being guessed at.
One graph, stable ids
Put every entity in a single @graph and give each a stable @id. Reference entities by id rather than repeating them, so your Organization is defined once and pointed at from every Article.
The entities that matter for articles
An article needs a headline, description, datePublished and dateModified in ISO-8601, an author Person, a publisher Organization, and a mainEntityOfPage. Adding a reviewedBy Person is one of the strongest trust signals you can emit.
Dates are one source of truth
The dates in your structured data must match the dates visible on the page and the timestamps in your Open Graph tags. Drive all three from the same field so they can never drift.
Validate in CI
Rich-result validators are useful, but the real guarantee is a test that renders each page type and asserts the JSON parses and contains its required properties. Ship it and run it on every build.
Frequently asked questions
- Should I use multiple JSON-LD scripts or one graph?
- Prefer a single @graph. It lets you define shared entities like your Organization once and reference them by @id, avoiding duplication and ambiguity.
- What is reviewedBy and why does it matter?
- reviewedBy links an article to the Person who fact-checked it. It is a strong E-E-A-T signal that both search engines and AI answer engines weigh when deciding what to trust and cite.