Only 4% of UK businesses implement Person schema — structured data that connects content to named, credentialed people. Content with Author/Person schema is 3x more likely to be cited by AI platforms. With 96% of businesses missing this signal, Person schema represents one of the largest competitive gaps in AI search optimisation.

What Person schema does

Person schema tells AI platforms who wrote or is associated with your content. It provides structured information about the author's name, job title, employer, credentials, and links to their professional profiles. This allows AI to verify the credibility of the person behind the content — a key factor in whether AI cites it.

Why it delivers a 3x citation lift

AI platforms assess content credibility before citing it. A named author with verifiable credentials — LinkedIn profile, professional qualifications, other published work — is a significantly stronger trust signal than anonymous or unattributed content. Person schema provides this verification in a machine-readable format that AI can process without ambiguity.

The 3x lift comes from multiple factors:

Trust verification — AI can cross-reference the author with LinkedIn, publications, and professional registrations
Expertise signal — credentials and job titles indicate subject matter expertise
Entity connection — Person schema with sameAs creates a verifiable entity graph connecting the author to the organisation
Content attribution — AI can attribute specific claims to specific credentialed individuals

The 96% gap

Despite the clear impact, our audit found that 96% of UK SME websites do not implement Person schema. The reasons are straightforward:

Most web developers have never heard of Person schema
Standard SEO agencies implement Organisation and Article but skip Person
It requires effort — you need to create structured data for each team member or author
The AI search benefit has only recently become clear through research data

This gap is also an opportunity. Because almost nobody is using Person schema, implementing it gives you an immediate competitive advantage that most of your competitors will not match for months or years.

How to implement Person schema

Person schema is added as JSON-LD in your page's head section. Here is a basic example:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Person",
  "name": "Oliver Mackman",
  "jobTitle": "Founder",
  "worksFor": {
    "@type": "Organisation",
    "name": "Rank4AI"
  },
  "sameAs": [
    "https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamparker/",
    "https://twitter.com/adamparker"
  ],
  "url": "https://rank4ai.co.uk/team/adam-parker/"
}
</script>

Where to add Person schema

Page type	How to use Person schema
Blog posts	Add Person as the `author` of your Article schema
Team/About pages	Standalone Person schema for each team member
Service pages	Person schema for the service lead or expert
Homepage	Person schema for the founder/CEO, connected to Organisation via `worksFor`

The connection to Organisation schema

Person schema works best when connected to Organisation schema through worksFor and sameAs relationships. This creates a compound entity signal — AI can see that a named, credentialed person works for a verified organisation, and that both entities are cross-referenced across professional platforms.

Our audit found that 44% of UK SMEs also lack Organisation schema, meaning the vast majority have neither the personal nor organisational entity signals that AI platforms look for.

Read our complete schema markup guide · See all AI search statistics

Only 4% of UK Businesses Use Person Schema