Medical-review byline

A medical-review byline is a short, visible statement on any page that makes clinical claims: "Medically reviewed by Dr. Jane Rivera, MD, board-certified dermatologist. Last reviewed March 2026." Large health publishers use the pattern routinely, and a private practice can use it with more authority, because the reviewer is the clinician patients will actually see.

Google's quality rater guidelines ask raters to judge health content by the expertise of its creator and to treat YMYL pages without clear expertise as low quality. A byline does not change rankings by itself, but it makes the expertise legible to raters, to readers, and to AI systems that look for who stands behind a claim. Done well it has four parts: the reviewer's name and credentials, a link to a bio page that lists training, board certification, and licenses with links to the verifying records, a last-reviewed date that is genuinely updated when the content is checked, and the same facts in the page's Article and Person markup, using reviewedBy and lastReviewed on a MedicalWebPage.

What it is not: a stock "reviewed by our medical team" with no name, or a date that changes on every deploy. Both read as decoration. Our audit checks clinical pages for a named reviewer, a resolvable bio, and a review date that is not stale.